Success Stories
See how Zaelab helped Milwaukee Tool move from complex Excel-based order entry to an automated, composable B2B commerce platform that powers thousands of simultaneous promotions across North America and LATAM.
Company Size
Company
Milwaukee Tool is a global leader in professional power tools, built for the trades that use their tools every day. The business grew from a one-billion-dollar company in 2019 into a ten-billion-dollar manufacturer under TTI, with a strategy focused entirely on the pro contractor: the best, most durable tools for the people who rely on them to make a living. That growth came with a pricing and promotions machine unlike any other in the industry.
Milwaukee Tool ran B2B quoting and transactions through complex Excel spreadsheets with deeply embedded logic that could not scale. Sales reps filled out the spreadsheets, and operations teams keyed the orders into the ERP by hand. Every month and quarter, the company had to release a refreshed spreadsheet to the whole organization, and any mistake meant a company-wide re-release.
The pricing engine ran 7,000 to 8,000 simultaneous promotions at once, layering consumer promotions on top of B2B PCE codes for accounts like Home Depot, Ace Hardware, and Northern Tool. The existing engine, built on Dynamics, could not keep up with the company's rapid growth and ran into daily performance problems. It was the most complex pricing setup Zaelab had seen to date.
Fundamental bottlenecks in order entry and pricing were actively suppressing growth and preventing customer experience improvements as the business scaled toward $10B. Other SIs had pushed back on the complexity; nobody wanted to take it on.
Zaelab introduced a 4-phase program to rebuild an automated order entry system built on SAP Commerce Cloud. The program started with a 12-week proof of concept to prove out the architecture, then expanded into a multi-year engagement spanning pricing, customer experience, and deployment.
Zaelab rebuilt Milwaukee Tool's pricing and promotions engine on the Drools open source rules engine, wrapped in a composable layer that could manage 7,000 to 8,000 simultaneous promotions across both B2B and consumer channels at performance and scale. The engine became the source of truth for pricing, with ERP systems and other applications calling it rather than the reverse.
Zaelab's composable architecture scaled across North America and LATAM, integrating with multiple ERP systems and culminating in Connect: a unified order management front end for customers, reps, and partners. Connect replaced the spreadsheet entirely and is now where salespeople, CSRs, and external distributors place orders instead of going to the ERP.
SAP Commerce Cloud — the composable commerce and pricing backbone of the platform, housing the Drools rules engine that powers the promotions business.
ERP systems (multiple) — order, inventory, and fulfillment data flowing to and from Connect across North America and LATAM, including the company's move to a new ERP mid-program.
Connect — the self-service order management front end now used by customers, sales reps, CSRs, and distributors for pricing, availability, placement, and tracking.
✔ Eliminated manual order entry entirely, reallocating sales and CX resources to higher-value customer relationships
✔ 100% reduction in manual order entry, with 50%+ time saved per order
✔ Order processing costs dropped from $8 to $1 per order, delivering significant and sustained operational savings across North America and LATAM
✔ Pricing engine now manages 7,000 to 8,000 simultaneous promotions across B2B and consumer channels
Milwaukee Tool no longer depends on spreadsheets and manual data entry to run its commerce business. The team that once spent its week re-keying orders into the ERP now manages pricing and promotions through a system built to scale with the business.
The composable foundation means the platform can keep pace with Milwaukee Tool's growth and internal teams' plans to bring more functionality in-house. What was once a fragmented, spreadsheet-driven operation is now a unified, automated order management platform built for the pace of a ten-billion-dollar company.
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