Bunzl Australasia taps Adelaide artificial intelligence startup Complexica

Bunzl Australasia, the local division of the 13,000-staff worldwide outsourcing giant, has turned to artificial intelligence vendor Complexica to help its team manage the "high level of complexity" that comes with 10,000 customers and more than 40,000 SKUs.

Complexica, based in Adelaide, has won to contract to deploy its order management system (OMS) for in-field sales reps and customer service staff. The system, which runs on Amazon Web Services, is powered by 'Larry', which Complexica dubs a 'Digital Analyst'.

Larry was the creation of a company rich in PhD talent; Complexica boasts a deep bench of scientific advisors and is run by managing director Matthew Michalewicz, his father and chief scientist Dr Zbigniew "Mike" Michalewicz, and chief software architect Constantin Chiriac. The roster boasts data scientists and is supported by multiple universities.

While Complexica might still fly under the radar, its team has form. Matthew Michalewicz and his father sold their previous company, $20 million-turnover SolveIT Software, to Schneider Electric in 2012. A previous venture was acquired by IBM.

Bunzl is just the latest customer win since Complexica exited stealth mode and began selling the product commercially. Others include Coventry Group, Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer, DuluxGroup and Lion. They join foundation customers PFD Food Services and Liquor Marketing Group, which supported Complexica during more than 12 months of development.

Kim Hetherington, chief executive of Bunzl Australasia, said: "Given we supply over 10,000 customers with an extensive product range in excess of 40,000 SKUs, there is a high level of complexity our team needs to manage on a day-to-day basis.

“To help our sales team focus on what they do best – provide maximum customer service and value to our customers – we have partnered with Complexica to provide real-time information by automating processes to reduce inherent complexity, particularly in the areas of in-field quoting and order processing.

"Complexica’s order management system and Larry, the Digital Analyst, will provide our sales team of more than 300 with real-time analytics, insights, to empower decision making and enhanced support. This will create more time for our teams to enable them to see more customers each day and provide the Bunzl personalised experience.”

Matthew Michalewicz added: "Larry will provide Bunzl with advanced customer segmentation, profiling, and personalisation capabilities, thereby leading to improved sales and marketing effectiveness and better engagement with customers.”