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Ace Hardware Retools Company-Wide Extranet with Endeca ProFind

By: Ace Hardware |  2 Shares     255 Reads

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 7, 2005— Endeca, the leading provider of Guided Navigation®, Search and Analysis solutions announced today that Ace Hardware has selected the Endeca ProFind® search and navigation platform to help store employees quickly find and order products from across the hardware chain's collective, nationwide inventory. The new software will be used to search and browse Ace Hardware's ACENET, a company-wide, employee-facing extranet that connects more than 4,700 individual stores. As a result, Ace expects to improve customer service, reduce wait times, increase in-store transactions and boost its competitive position in the marketplace.

ACENET represents Ace Hardware's initial search project using the Endeca platform. In the future, Ace plans to rollout Endeca solutions across additional internal applications.

The world's largest hardware cooperative, Ace owner/retailer-operated stores offer hardware, gardening equipment and supplies, housewares and power tools to local customers across the United States and beyond. To better serve these customers and take advantage of the chain's collective inventory of more than 65,000 SKUs, Ace's IT team created ACENET, a web-based system that lets employees access and order products, regardless of location. The system itself needed to be enhanced with intuitive and powerful retrieval capabilities to help employees quickly find specific products and explore related offerings. After a review of commercial offerings, the Ace team opted for a new kind of search engine—one that would combine search and browsing into a single integrated function.

"Product search is clearly among the most critical functions of ACENET. But our current search engine required updating to overcome some fundamental challenges—from synonyms to misspellings and even how different products were categorized," said Frank Murphy, Manager Retail IT, Ace Hardware Corporation. "Endeca has provided Ace with a solution that not only addresses these common stumbling blocks, but takes search a step further, giving our retail associates the ability to intuitively and effortlessly filter results and explore related products."

Used on websites, intranets, extranets, and within enterprises, Endeca ProFind is a next-generation information retrieval platform that combines highly advanced search with Guided Navigation and Content Spotlighting capabilities to help people quickly and easily find the information most relevant to their unique needs. Endeca's approach to information retrieval mimics the human discovery process by integrating the two most common means of finding information online—searching and browsing—allowing people to continually adapt and hone their search based on their own determination of relevancy. This combination gives organizations the powerful and intuitive tools to maximize the value of internal and external information, regardless of source, structure or file type.

"Retailers are increasingly recognizing the value next-generation search and navigation solutions bring to the entire enterprise—from boosting online sales and improving call center support to enhancing the in-store experience and analyzing customer and sales data," said Jim Baum, president and CEO of Endeca. "A highly respected business—both nationally and locally —Ace Hardware is a great example of a retailer unlocking its collective information to improve the customer experience and increase the competitive advantage of each individual store."

About Endeca
Endeca's award-winning Guided Navigation, Enterprise Search, and Analysis solutions help organizations integrate, discover, and navigate enterprise data to solve business problems associated with information overload. Endeca's customers include a wide range of enterprises, including retailers (Barnes & Noble, The Home Depot, Walmart.com); financial services (Bank of America, MFS Investment Management, Putnam Investments); manufacturing and distribution (IBM, Arrow Electronics, John Deere); media and publishing (World Book and IHS) and government (the Library of Congress, NASA, the National Cancer Institute). Endeca is a private company headquartered in Cambridge, MA. More information:www.endeca.com or email us at info@endeca.com.

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