During the past four years, MRC Global has significantly transformed its digital commerce capabilities. Valve World had the pleasure of speaking with Dale Kendall, Vice President of e-commerce at MRC Global, about the company’s digital ordering and integration capabilities, the benefits of their digital offering and digitally assisting individuals at every level.
By Charlie Evans, Valve World
According to Kendall, “I joined MRC Global four years ago, just as we were embarking on a major transformation of our digital e-commerce capabilities. Growing customer demand for digital engagement highlighted the need for a major technology and capability upgrade.” Kendall, along with Executive Sponsor Grant Bates (Senior Vice President of North America Operations and e-Commerce), developed a multi-year e-commerce strategic roadmap for MRC Global.
“Our roadmap focused on digitizing the end-to-end supply chain to grow our digital sales channel, enhance customer experience and lower costs for both our customers and ourselves,” Kendall explained. “We invested in software and resources, then began executing the plan. Despite 2020 bringing the depths of the pandemic and a challenging, uncertain economic landscape, our leadership’s decision to launch a major strategic initiative—while many companies were in survival mode—positioned our digital program for a significant leap forward.”
User preferences shifting to digital
“Like most companies, we were experiencing a gradual shift towards digital, but the pandemic significantly accelerated this trend,” Kendall observed. “Remote work mandates drove a spike in demand for digital business transactions. Additionally, both our customers and our own organization saw a demographic shift as many seasoned employees retired during the pandemic, often replaced by more digitally inclined Zillennials.”
These trends intensified MRC Global’s need to expand digital capabilities for both customer-facing operations and internal users. The digital tools not only enable faster onboarding of new team members but also help mitigate the loss of institutional knowledge.
Elevating and complementing customer service digitally
“Much of our value as a distributor is in simplifying what is often a very complex supply chain,” Kendall explained. “In many cases, providing digital self-service solutions directly to customers is helpful, but some steps in the process require direct engagement and expertise from our team members. Our goal is to offer customers digital self-service options where they want them, as well as easy access to our team members’ knowledge and service. We value our relationships with customers and recognize the insights our team provides. We do not want to eliminate that; we want to digitally assist it.”
To achieve these goals, MRC Global focuses on delivering digital solutions across three key areas of activity. First, through digital ordering and quoting, customers can place orders and request quotes through a variety of digital methods. They can access the MRCGO™ website via web or mobile, or through a custom punchout solution.
Additionally, MRC Global offers direct custom integrations, with over 600 integrations currently supporting nearly 300 customers. Customers can also place orders directly from stockrooms at their locations using scan-guns, and soon, through a suite of managed inventory solutions including weighted bins, cabinets, lockers and radio-frequency identification (RFID).
Second, MRC Global’s post-order account management provides customers with 24/7 access to critical data, including order status, order history, reports, invoices, mill test reports (MTR), proof of delivery (POD) and expediting to keep them informed and connected.
Finally, MRC Global has developed a comprehensive set of internal digital tools to assist sales and service representatives (SSR) and other team members, enabling them to serve customers with greater efficiency and accuracy.
Digital service platform
To best accomplish these goals, MRC Global leveraged a full suite of Salesforce cloud-based applications to develop an integrated “Digital Service Platform” for both its customers and team members.
“Traditional customer relationship management (CRM) systems are usually an account management and business development tool, but we use ours in conjunction with our MRCGO.com website to digitally enable all aspects of the interactions between our customers and team members,” explained Kendall.
“Our large, complex customers often require input and experience from MRC Global team members during the purchasing process. In some cases, we have a more straightforward maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) buying process. For these, we agree on set contract pricing, and customers reorder a finite set of items largely through self-service. This can be done either through integrations with their procurement systems or directly on our website.”
“In many cases, there’s significant back-and-forth between the customer, our SSRs, and product experts. This includes discussions about recommended products, expedited orders and responses to quote requests,” Kendall explained. “Our platform enables all these interactions to occur in a single, shared environment. This provides fast and accurate responses to customers while allowing us to track all aspects of these transactions, regardless of their origin.”
Digital growth and measurable benefits
Since launching their Digital Service Platform, MRC Global has seen significant customer adoption and numerous benefits.
MRC Global CEO, Rob Saltiel, highlighted this digital progress in a recent earnings call, “Our digital strategy that began several years ago continues to evolve and deliver great dividends in the form of additional sales and an improved customer experience. We have developed and deployed a user-friendly digital customer service platform that in addition to product ordering provides self-service features such as order expediting, order documentation and past order histories. This useful functionality drives efficiency and cost savings for our customers and for us while increasing customer loyalty and retention.”
Kendall reported, “Our digital initiative has significantly boosted our performance. In the U.S., digitally transacted orders have increased from 45% to over 66%. Digital revenue has surged by 72%, reaching more than USD 1.5 billion. Moreover, customers now manage thousands of post-order service inquiries online annually, reducing the need for direct engagement with our SSRs.”
“The strong gains we’ve generated in digital adoption aren’t solely due to the technical applications we’ve purchased and implemented. Our most valuable asset isn’t software, but rather the highly talented and committed cross-functional team of technical, commercial, and usability experts we’ve assembled.
Notably, we’ve embedded ‘Digital Adoption Representatives’ within our e-commerce team. These digitally-oriented individuals, often web-savvy SSRs, bring strong industrial distribution experience to the role. They evangelize our digital applications to both customers and internal users.
Another key to our success is our extensive and continuous engagement with internal users and customers to tailor solutions to business needs. In our view, successful digital solutions require 40% technology and 60%persistent user experience tuning and training.” “Initially, e-commerce growth was driven by MRO-type orders,” Kendall explained. “Our utilities customers exemplify this trend. They typically purchase a set number of items at agreed-upon contract prices. We build them custom-tailored catalogs, including contract pricing and real-time inventory information.
They can then reorder items via our website, a direct integration, or a custom punch-out to MRCGO™. This process is tailor-made for e-commerce, resulting in nearly 90% of orders from our utilities customers being transacted digitally.”
Leveraging AI for quoting
MRC Global knew they had opportunities in the more project-oriented aspects of their business. “A quoting ecosystem was developed within the Digital Service Platform where quotes can be submitted and viewed by customers and responded to by SSRs,” Kendall explained. “Regardless of how the quote is received, it is ’digitized’ and uploaded to the system where it can be routed for responses, including breaking it into sub-quotes routed to the correct experts in the company. All of this is tracked via dashboards, which allows SSRs to see that they have a quote that requires a response. You can see where the quotes are, which ones have been completed, and how long the turnaround was,” Kendall said.
“Next, we built an automated quote response tool using AI. Basically, once the customers quote request is uploaded, the system uses AI to suggest corresponding MRC Global products. The tool learns from every quote we respond to, so it continually gets smarter and faster,” said Kendall.
“This can reduce the time spent on larger quotes from hours to minutes and improves accuracy – particularly for newer SSRs. By significantly speeding up response time and improving accuracy, win rates can be improved.”
“This past September, we were invited to speak at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual event in San Francisco,” Kendall noted.
“Artificial Intelligence was a major focus of the conference. From our observations, we appear to be an early adopter of AI in the industrial distribution sector, using it in particularly impactful ways.”
Looking to the future
“We aim to further leverage AI in our quoting tool and are exploring additional opportunities to enhance efficiency in other frequent customer service tasks,” Kendall explained. “While AI’s potential has been discussed for years, it has now matured to a point where we can create tools that significantly reduce workload, improve turnaround time, and increase accuracy. As the technology rapidly evolves, we’re evaluating its application across all aspects of our commercial and back-office operations.”
“We are currently integrating our Digital Service Platform with MRC Global’s new Oracle Cloud-based ERP system. This integration is expected to be fully implemented and operational by mid-2025.”
“We’re launching a comprehensive suite of inventory management solutions, including lockers, weighted bins, and RFID systems, to be installed at customer locations,” Kendall continued.
“Looking ahead, we plan to expand integrations with our suppliers, offering customers greater visibility and more options. Our ultimate goal is to fully digitize the entire supply chain.”
MRC Global at a Glance
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Worldwide locations:
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MRC Global at a Glance
Houston, Texas
Over 210 service locations including service centers, valves & engineering centers and regional distribution centers
Pipe, valves, valve automation & fittings
Gas utilities, downstream, industrial and energy transition, production and transmission infrastructure
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