Scaling Pricing Expertise Across Nearly 700 Companies.

A Dayton, Ohio–based network of 680+ locally owned wholesale distribution companies, with roughly 9,500 employees. Winsupply serves contractors across plumbing; HVAC and refrigeration; electrical; waterworks; pipe; valves and fittings; and more.

A group of analysts providing advice on pricing strategy for independent local companies, each shaped by its own trade, region, size, and goals. There is no single price that fits them all, so the work is customized, company by company.

The Challenge

Each Local Company in the network of 680+ Local Companies sets and manages their own pricing. To advise this process, Winsupply operates a Pricing Services Team. Being able to advise that many companies across multiple wholesale industries involves judgment that takes years to build, and for a long time most of it sat with one person: the Director of Pricing Services. He could look at a product and know how to price it to foster competition and win business from a plumbing house in one region versus an HVAC company in another. The hard part was training, getting what was in his head into a growing team. Experience was the only teacher, and matching his level could take a new analyst years. What they needed was a faster way to put his product knowledge into an accessible resource, so newer analysts could make those calls sooner.

Spreadsheets didn’t carry it. Neither did the ERP. New analysts could be given the tools, but not the years of context, so they spent their days researching individual items instead of making the strategic calls that actually move margin. One local company might carry 10,000 to 20,000 SKUs. “Nobody prices that many items one at a time,” explained Jesse Maag, Director of Pricing Services. “The team needed a way to make 500 decisions, not 10,000.”

Underneath sat the real bottleneck: millions of products in the PIM system, loosely organized. Without a clean way to group them, every pricing project meant starting from scratch and the number of local companies the team could serve in a year stayed capped by how fast a few experts could work. Jesse never framed this as what the old way cost. He framed it as how many companies would stay out of reach if nothing changed.

The Approach

At the time, Winsupply’s internal IT team had plenty of competing priorities, so Jesse pushed the problem up the ladder, where it was prioritized for its potential impact. A referral, through a senior leader’s community connection, pointed them to the team at Mined XAI. A few early conversations with Mined XAI’s Rajesh Naik (COO) and Kyle Siegrist (CSO), and the work moved quickly.

The first phase wasn’t about AI. It was cleanup. A product categorization already lived in the PIM, a hierarchy tree used in e-commerce that gets more specific as it goes down: fitting, copper fitting, etc. The data existed, but across millions of products, the team had no way to access it properly, and it wasn’t a perfect match for pricing. Mined XAI fine-tuned that categorization to fit pricing with their Product Characterization Tool: it makes the call right away and returns the why answer with the extra detail the team needs. So instead of researching every item and repeating the same decision, an analyst sees that these are all ProPress fittings and moves on.

It took more work than anyone first estimated; Winsupply carries a lot of products. But the categories only have to be built once. After that, the job didn’t change; it just got faster.

The Results

From FY25 to FY26, output per analyst climbed about 25% — from 12.7 projects a year to 15.7. That gain shows up per person, not just in the totals, even after the team added a fourth analyst. Each pricing project now takes about 25 fewer hours.

Across FY26, that added up to roughly 1,575 hours handed back to the team and 16 additional projects completed, about four more per person. Winsupply estimates the cleaner, faster pricing work drove around $2.5M in gross margin impact in FY26, with $3.25M projected for FY27 as more categories come online.

Adoption was “not at all” hard, in Jesse’s words. He calls the tool “a gift,” not “a change” — “a power drill instead of a screwdriver.” Instead of asking him what a product should be, an analyst opens the tool and the answer is already there, with the details to back it up. The support has matched it. When help is needed, the Mined XAI project team responds quickly, ensuring the pricing team is moving at the pace needed to support their partners.

The forward look is the part the team is most excited about. Clean data is the foundation; AI is the next floor.

Productivity and hours figures from Winsupply’s FY25–FY26 pricing project data.