Optimized pricing, better CX

Who are you?

Marshalls has been the UK’s leading hard landscaping manufacturer of natural stone and innovative concrete products for the construction, home improvement, and landscape markets since the 1890s. Over the years, the Marshalls brand and our products have become synonymous with quality, with the business supplying prestigious landmarks such as Trafalgar Square whilst also caring for the environment and the communities in which we operate.

What was your challenge?

Our commercial model is project-based, with multiple contractors bidding on the same project. We wanted to make more use of our vast amounts of data to ensure that this process is as quick and efficient for our customers as possible, allowing them to know whether or not their bid has been successful in the minimal amount of time.

We knew the answer to this could be found by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. However, in order to be in a position to achieve this, we first needed to ensure we were truly ready for AI. We had lots of data spread across multiple business systems and units – many of which were extremely complex – so we needed help in unifying our data and building the infrastructure needed to successfully deploy AI into our business.

What did Peak do?

Peak has used its AI platform – powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) – to unify our data from across multiple systems and datasets, giving us a more holistic view of our data and processes. On top of this, Peak has provided us with live AI integrations which deliver invaluable insights in real-time, all seamlessly integrated into our existing ERP systems.

This gives our team better visibility on the open projects and quotes, as well as their potential on a range of factors, such as the region in which the quote was ordered, the value of the quote in total and per quote line – as well as the average number of sales the customer makes per month. Data is securely stored in Amazon Redshift, while the models are stored in Amazon S3, and Amazon SageMaker is used to deploy the endpoints.

Peak is also providing AI workflow and data science training and support to our team, in order to help us learn and develop our internal AI capabilities.   

What’s the upshot?

Peak’s AI offering is empowering Marshalls customers to get the answers they need as quickly as possible, with our commercial team able to instantly provide bid decisions, as well as all of the information needed for the project in advance. This is significantly improving the experience of our customers – AI is speeding up the sales cycle and, at the same time, is helping us to increase the volume of sales we’re making.