IT Supplier Aces Direct Successfully Uses Icecat Commerce Services to Optimize its Processes

Aces Direct, a leading supplier of hardware, software, peripherals, and supplies, successfully used Icecat Commerce Services for over five years already. With the successful implementation of Icecat Connect and Iceportal, more than 1 million products are optimized in the Aces Direct ERP environment. Secondly, with Icecat Order, Aces Direct automates the order process to keep up-to-date with the product data. In this way, Aces Direct directly places purchase orders at its distributors and automatically receives an order confirmation, shipment details, and invoices. To manage the assortment, Aces Direct fully uses the PIM system “Icecat PIM”. In order to set all kinds of complicated filters and business rules to customize its needed assortment further.

Benefits of Automated Processes

The automated processes allow Aces Direct to work with up-to-date purchase data, including purchase price and stock level per supplier in one standardized catalog format. This is something that would typically be unmanageable when you receive price and stock information for more than 2 million products out of the 35+ distributors connected. The Icecat Commerce solutions give the opportunity to automatically standardize the unstructured data from the suppliers by using the Icecat database. For example, category, EAN/GTIN, and product title. 

Furthermore, with Icecat Order Aces Direct receives Order- and order status messages from its suppliers. This exchange service facilitates sending orders – after approval- to suppliers from Aces Direct. But also real-time stock requests per product.

The partnership with Icecat Commerce and their understanding of our business challenges and wishes are translated in services and products that really help with more and better automation and optimization of our processes.

Bram Sauer – Supply Chain Manager at Aces Direct

Iceportal usage

Aces Direct uses Icecat Connect and Icecat Order, which gives them exclusive access to Iceportal, the web-based portal primarily used to find information about products and suppliers. Here Aces Direct can easily find:

• Product availability from their connected suppliers. But, also from optional suppliers that connect to the Icecat Commerce Connect service.
• Full Fact sheets (rich content) from the products, sourced from Icecat.
• The latest order status updates and order messages are sent to the supplier.
• Aces Direct can set rules to ensure timely order responses when a supplier uses the Iceportal to manage the Aces Direct orders*.

Manage products online

To manage all the 1 million products in its assortment, Aces Direct uses Icecat PIM. Via Icecat PIM Aces Direct can easily import any data of any volume into a master catalog. This is in order to select, filter, and create sub-catalogs with all kinds of pricing, and product relations (upselling), select warehouses, and maintain product categories and brands. Especially the advanced assortment and filtering options are essential for Aces Direct. As often, suppliers send an entire assortment file of their catalog. Icecat PIM has a flexible filtering mechanism to exclude or include ranges of products based on the filter rule values that Aces Direct can set. For example, filtering on brand, supplier, category, stock, price, or any combination is possible.

Do you want more information on how Icecat Commerce services can optimize your processes? Then please contact us via our website.

* Suppliers can use the Iceportal as well to manage the orders that come from Aces Direct. Usage is primarily by suppliers that do not have the technical possibilities to handle orders via EDI.