How Industrial Electronics Company JC-Electronics Increased Efficiency with Mailbox Automation

Learn how JC-Electronics is able to save time and gets to make faster deals for the buying of industrial electronics.

Team

250+ employees

Sector

Industrial Electronics

Solution

About JC-Electronics

JC-Electronics is an industrial electronics company aiming to be the biggest player in the refurbishment of industrial electronics. Starting 2006, they now offer more than 300.000 products like HMI, PLC, Drives and PC/PGs.

JC-Electronics is able to help businesses quickly with specialized refurbished parts for their machines. These parts are in-house refurbished and have their special JCertified quality mark that gives 2 years warranty (machines excluded).

From new to 30+ year old products that are fully refurbished by JC-Electronics, there is a high chance they have the product for your industrial machine.

To achieve the vast amount of (niche) products, JC-Electronics does not only sell, but also buys products, and refurbishes all used products in-house. With their more than 100+ skilled technicians they are able to refurbish all kinds of electronics with the highest standards and quality.

Buying Niche Parts is Challenging and Time Sensitive

Buying niche industrial electronics is a complex and time-sensitive task. The purchasing department faces the challenge of sourcing used electronics that require expert knowledge and a sharp eye.

JC-Electronics sources from a broad pallet of suppliers, from individuals to large corporations, each presenting their unique challenges. Part of buying used industrial electronics is getting incoming offers per email.

Daily, we get around 100+ offers by emails with one or multiple products. Sometimes we even get whole Excel sheets with products in them.

Marco Koster

Team Manager Purchasing

Key challenges of buying used industrial electronics from suppliers per email are:

Offers in different formats and conditions: As Marco mentioned, emails sent by suppliers are often in completely different formats. There are mails with a few pictures, a PDF or even Excel sheets containing hundreds of electronics sent to their buying department. This makes for a lot of work and manually summarizing them is prone to errors.

Language Barriers: Operating globally, the team receives offers in multiple languages, adding complexity to the process.

Time Sensitivity: The need for quick decision-making is crucial, as the availability and relevance of these offered electronics can change rapidly.

These challenges are something JC-Electronics wished to overcome by partnering with DataNorth.

Gaining a Competitive Edge for Buying Niche Industrial Electronics

Faced with the challenge of handling a high volume of complex, multilingual offers in used industrial electronics, JC-Electronics approached DataNorth for a tailored solution.

The primary challenge for JC-Electronics to overcome revolved around the time-consuming process of manually sorting and investigating offers from around the globe.

We had to go through all of these offers manually, to determine, what is on offer, what is the condition, the item-number and is it interesting for us? This was a lot of copy and pasting.

Marco Koster

Team Manager Purchasing

Seeing the potential AI could have, DataNorth proposed an innovative solution: an automated mailbox system designed to revolutionize their way of working with handling incoming offers for industrial electronics.

The mailbox automation solution implemented at JC-Electronics contains a two-step prioritization system, ensuring maximum efficiency.

Automated Email Sorting: First, the system uses advanced algorithms to analyze and rank each email based on its urgency and relevance. This reduces the time spent on manual email organization significantly, allowing the purchasing team to quickly focus on the most promising offers.

Prioritized Summary of Offers: After sorting the email, the solution further organizes the content, creating summaries of the products on offer. It ranks these products from most to least relevant, streamlining the process by reducing time, minimizing errors, and focusing on the most valuable opportunities first.

Marco from JC-Electronics highlights the effectiveness of this system: “The mailbox automation tool is a lot less prone to making mistakes compared to our previous method.”

Language Translation: Adding to efficiency, the integrated language translation feature accurately interprets offers in multiple languages, ensuring proper categorization and maintaining the prioritization of offers.

The mailbox automation solution not only streamlined JC-Electronics’ purchasing process but also provided them with a competitive edge in the global market of refurbished industrial electronics.

Measurable Improvement from the Mailbox Automation

The implementation of the automated mailbox solution marked a significant leap forward for JC-Electronics in managing their incoming offers. The system’s impact on efficiency and productivity was immediately noticeable.

hours saved, per week, per purchaser

100+

mails tagged/sorted automatically daily

24/7

operating

You don’t have to be a company like Apple to make use of AI technologies.

Marco Koster

Team Manager Purchasing

This AI-powered solution has not only made JC-Electronics’ buying process more efficient, but it also reinforced their standing as an innovative player in the refurbished industrial electronics sector.

The success of mailbox automation has paved the way for continued collaboration with DataNorth to optimize other business processes at JC-Electronics with AI.

Wondering how Mailbox Automation can make your organization more efficient?

+31 50 2111631