Ben Swanson
Joint Managing Director
At a glance
Industry: Distribution of adhesives, coatings, curing equipment and dispensing systems
Size: 35 employees
Location: Kidlington, Oxfordshire, UK
Using Kimia: 9 months
Key suppliers: Bostik, Dymax
1 hrFor a full day’s territory planning
86%Approved by Intertronics’ own experts before anyone got access
500 hrsReturned to the business in nine months
The customer called five suppliers
A buyer with a bonding problem does not ring one distributor. Ben Swanson, Intertronics’ joint managing director, hears the same thing back constantly: they went out and spoke to five people, and Intertronics answered first. Thirty-five people in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, distributing adhesives, coatings, curing equipment and dispensing systems for manufacturers including Bostik and Dymax, and the whole competitive position is that the reply lands within a couple of hours while the rest of the market takes longer.
Swanson does not treat answering first as the win.
“It’s often first, it’s not quite enough. We also want to answer best. So it’s being fast, but with purpose. And if you don’t have the right information available to you, it’s very easy to only be fast and not be right as well.”
The risk in being the quick one
That last sentence is the exposure. Intertronics’ product data sat across SharePoint, document libraries and supplier websites, and in the heads of long-serving staff, with no version that outranked the rest. Two sources could contradict each other, and a fast reply is precisely how the wrong one reaches a customer. Every new product line the business took on made it harder to hold together.
General AI tools were already in the building, used for admin and office work, and Swanson had found where they stop.
“Most AI tools aren’t built to answer high-end technical chemistry queries,” he says. “Kimia is — and that made all the difference.”
It had to get past their own experts first
Accuracy was the thing that could have sunk it, so it was settled before anyone in sales had access. Through a three-month foundation phase, Intertronics’ technical specialists checked Kimia’s answers against what a human expert would have said, and it cleared for rollout only once it held at 86% expert approval.
The line Intertronics has held since is that no customer ever receives an answer straight from the system. It enhances the people. It does not reply for them.
Where the days went
Territory reps used to spend Monday to Thursday on the road and Friday planning the week ahead. They now enter their known customers and postcodes, ask for similar businesses in the same area, and get prep sheets back for each stop. The day is about an hour. Less time behind a desk, more in front of a customer.
Matt Baseley, who leads sales, built a piece of application research that would have taken a week: a drone, blown up into a diagram showing every point on it where an Intertronics material could be used, and the businesses likely to need the same thing. It took him about half a day. Separately, a customer stuck on a robot-programming fault would once have meant a long call or a site visit, a full day of somebody’s time and one to two days to resolve. He solved it at his desk in half an hour, on his break, during a training session. Two further proposals were open with that customer at the time, and Intertronics closed them.
Nine months in, 998 technical queries have gone through, and modelled conservatively at thirty minutes each, roughly five hundred hours have come back.
Fast, with purpose
Swanson’s view is that Kimia has made Intertronics faster still. That was never the part he was worried about. What it also did was make the fast answer a safer one to give, and for a company whose reputation rests on getting back to people before anyone else does, that is the only version of speed that was ever worth having.
