Ace: the helpful search place

Ace Hardware wants to improve customer service and reduce wait times through a new search and navigation platform it is deploying. The solution from Endeca is expected to help store employees quickly find and order products across the hardware chain's nationwide inventory. It will be used to search and browse ACENET, the company's employee-facing extranet, which connects more than 4,700 individual stores.

ACENET, which was created by Ace's IT team, needed more intuitive and powerful retrieval capabilities to help employees quickly find specific products and explore related offerings. After a review of the various options, the team chose a search engine that would combine search and browsing into a single function.

"Product search is clearly among the most critical functions of ACENET," says Frank Murphy, retail IT manager with Ace Hardware Corp. "But our current search engine required updating to overcome some fundamental challenges—from synonyms to misspellings and even how different products were categorized. Endeca has provided Ace with a solution that not only addresses those 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."