Overview

Turtle is a leading US-based electrical and industrial distributor founded in 1923 by M. Berry Turtle and Bill Hughes. They have evolved into a fourth-generation, family-owned business, offering a diverse portfolio of products, services, and solutions to the industrial, construction, and commercial markets. Turtle is also helping clients with digital transformation through services like eProcurement and supply chain integration.  

Turtle has a network of branches and locations across the US and Canada, with plans for continued global expansion. They emphasize innovation and sustainability, with a vision to include major transformation in the electrical grids and infrastructure and greater energy efficiencies. 

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

As the distribution market continues to consolidate, with large corporations acquiring regional players, we face increased pressure to compete against conglomerates with greater purchasing power and the ability to offer lower prices. To stay competitive, our strategy focuses on reshaping how we serve our customers to foster loyalty and long-term relationships. 

A key part of this effort is creating a frictionless customer experience—starting with the Order-to-Cash process—by ensuring pricing is consistent, fair, and well-justified. Historically, pricing is determined by individual salespeople using a static pricing model that calculates target prices per SKU based on the item category within a customer segment.  While our seasoned sales team, many with 30+ years of experience, bring valuable insight into customer relationships and purchasing behavior, their pricing decisions often varied based on factors like volume, loyalty, and personal judgment. This introduced inconsistency in pricing for the same customer over time, discrepancies across similar customer segments, and misalignment with real-time market conditions, especially for commodity-driven products like aluminum, copper, and steel.  

To address this, we recognized that artificial intelligence (AI) could provide a smarter, more dynamic approach to pricing—one that could build customer trust while improving margins; however, we didn’t have success with the past with AI projects despite having a data scientist on staff. 

The Solution

To gain value from AI, we needed a partner with a proven track record in our industry. Moving to Infor CloudSuite Distribution gave us that opportunity because we could leverage Infor Industry AI to take full advantage of our data managed in the cloud to enrich every business decision with predictive and prescriptive AI-driven insights.

For our first AI initiative, we launched a dynamic pricing widget integrated directly into the Order Entry screen. This tool presents a recommended price and range—shown in either dollars or gross margin percentage—for any selected item, giving salespeople immediate, pricing guidance. The widget also includes competitor pricing for comparison, empowering sales reps to remain competitive when needed while capturing margin opportunities where possible.

The Data Science approach to the price recommendation factors in historical customer transactions, current commodity costs, and customer segmentation based on buying behavior to maximize profitability.

The results

With the AI-driven pricing widget embedded directly in the Order Entry screen, our 150-person salesforce is now equipped to make more strategic pricing decisions. As a result, our sales team is driving incremental margin growth across a business that generates $700 million in annual revenue.  

The pricing engine refreshes weekly, ensuring our pricing remains responsive to market shifts, commodity fluctuations, and global tariff impacts. This dynamic approach enables our sales team to engage customers in more value-driven conversations, with clear rationale behind pricing decisions. As a result, we’re building stronger customer relationships rooted in trust and transparency. 

With pricing consistency across customer segments, the variability that existed under our previous manual approach is eliminated, further reinforcing fairness and professionalism in every transaction. 

What makes this solution especially powerful is its ability to learn continuously. Each time a user selects a recommended price, that transaction data feeds back into the model, allowing it to refine and improve future recommendations.  

The widget has also proven especially valuable for onboarding new salespeople. By providing recommendations instantly, it shortens decision-making time, reduces reliance on coaching from tenured staff, and accelerates the ramp-up period for new hires. We now have a more systematic pricing process that empowers even the newest team members to place orders quickly and confidently. 

Metrics

The pricing widget has proven to be an incredibly user-friendly and intuitive tool, making it easy for our salesforce to adopt for smarter, data-driven pricing decisions. In just four months since deployment, with only partial training and adoption, we've already seen impressive business outcomes: 

• $700,000 increase in revenue 
• $500,000 improvement in margin 
• 1.3% net increase in gross margin 

These gains provide the financial foundation to reinvest in innovation, with a continued focus on enhancing customer experience.  One of our next steps includes exploring Agentic AI for faster, more autonomous and personalized interactions with our customers. 

In addition to improving customer experience for competitive advantage, a key objective of our innovation strategy is to 'do more with less.' As a privately held company, we self-fund our growth, so we rely on advanced technologies to optimize operations for better margins. This approach will allow us to scale without adding headcount, while also improving employee satisfaction by removing the burden of manual, repetitive work. 

 To achieve this, we’re currently implementing Infor Velocity Suite – pre-built solutions to automate and deliver insights using advanced technologies such as AI, GenAI, RPA, and more.  The first solution we plan to deploy is Invoice Processing Automation with the goal of automating 90% of our invoice processing workflow.   

The Technology

Infor Industry AI provides a dedicated Infor data science team and Infor OS technology platform to create AI driven solutions that meet our requirements and elevate the overall solution by bringing their expertise and insights.  For the pricing widget, the data science approach was to create a pricing model that is updated weekly with most recent transaction data, raw material fluctuation, rebates, replenishment costs, and customer segmentation based on buying behavior. 

Disruptive Factor

Our success with AI-driven pricing has fundamentally changed the way we view AI's role in solving complex business challenges. At the outset, the pricing project felt almost too good to be true. While Infor provided the technology platform and a skilled data science team to co-create a smart pricing widget, I’ll admit — midway through, I had serious doubts about whether it would work. But through disciplined weekly sprint meetings and close collaboration, we delivered a pricing tool that exceeded expectations. It’s accurate today, and thanks to its machine learning foundation, it will only continue to improve over time. 

This success has opened the door to using AI and Data Science in other areas of our business. Just as we helped sales make smarter pricing decisions, we’re now helping procurement make better inventory decisions. Historically, our purchasing team relied on static reorder points — numbers set a year or more ago — to determine when to replenish stock.  With AI, we’re moving toward a dynamic purchasing model that leverages more accurate, real-time reorder points. This allows us to optimize inventory not just for cost and storage, but to ensure we have the right product mix, at the right locations, aligned with demand velocity and customer needs. 

Looking ahead, we’re excited to build the next generation of inventory management — going beyond what CloudSuite Distribution offers today by embedding advanced AI capabilities.  

Shining Moment

What I love about the pricing widget is how simple and elegant it is. It hides a ton of complexity behind a clean, intuitive interface, which makes it incredibly easy for our salespeople to use. I’m proud that when I show them how it works, I say, 'Look, these three little numbers represent powerful AI and machine learning at work — all the complex pricing logic you'd normally think through is already baked in.' That simplicity, backed by sophisticated intelligence, is what makes it so powerful.