Orgill Case Study | 13 Creating Scale Lee points out that this kind of dedication of resources to item data management and maintenance would simply not be realistic for an individual retail operation to maintain. “Unilog has a team of dedicated associates working full time enriching data,” she says. “We are enriching about 40,000 items a month. It would take an independent hardware retailer like McGuckin and an army of people years to do this. In addition to that, we are putting more tech resources behind it to increase the automation of some of our processes, which is going to allow us to be even more efficient and cost-effective.” Lee notes that the items available through the Industry PIM go well beyond items stocked in Orgill’s warehouse. In fact, they include thousands of items from across the industry, including products not sold by Orgill from vendors such as Benjamin Moore and STIHL. “This is an important distinction, because we know that our goal is to service retailers as broadly as possible, and that means going beyond the assortment of Orgill’s stocked products,” Lee says. For McGuckin, this was also important as they wanted the ability to augment Orgill's vast selection of industry product information with their own assortments, including items that were only sold regionally or from local vendors—an important part of their store’s local character and brand. Currently, McGuckin offers a selection of approximately 80,000 items to customers through its eCommerce website, a vast improvement over its previous offering. Because of these kinds of needs, McGuckin, Orgill and Unilog continue to work hand-in-hand maintaining their unique set of data. “They are constantly making item submissions and keeping their site refreshed, so they are really a model for online assortment management,” Lee says. “This helped us learn best practices to help other dealers better understand how to manage their digital assortments.” According to Lee, of all the things the Orgill and McGuckin teams learned during the product data integration process, the most important may have been that the process of maintaining a website/eCommerce platform and the data it fuels isn’t a one-time thing. “It is a living and breathing thing that needs maintenance, care and refreshing, and I think that is also where Orgill, Unilog and McGuckin have worked so well in this process together,” she says. Today, McGuckin’s internal team, which includes about five individuals dedicated to inventory, marketing and managing the website, works closely with the Orgill and Unilog teams to ensure smooth operations. “That’s the nice thing about Orgill—they are a large company, but they kind of act like a smaller company, in a sense that I can talk to anyone at the company and get things done,” Harrison says. “I have never had a problem approaching anyone at Orgill. I had an inventory issue a while back, and 15 minutes later there were five other people working on it. I don’t think you get that from a lot of other companies, and that speaks volumes about what Orgill is like as a company.”
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