About the Customer
Easylot, a rapidly evolving online beverage commerce platform, is revolutionizing the way beverage selections are procured. Boasting numerous suppliers, it allows customers to assemble unique baskets from a broad range of products. Easylot’s mission is to provide its clients with the best value-for-money offers. It achieves this by searching for the combination of offers from different suppliers, which then creates the most favorable customer basket. In this way, the customer receives a single offer with the lowest possible price from the system, which sends the partial orders to all relevant trading partners. With this, the platform optimizes the procurement process and maximizes savings.
Customer Challenge
While the concept was promising, Easylot faced a complex problem: the exponential increase in possibilities when analyzing baskets assembled by customers. Due to the multitude of suppliers and the diversity of products placed in the basket, calculating the best price composition became an incredibly time-consuming task. Using brute force algorithms, generating offers could have taken months or even years, unacceptable for a business model built on speed and efficiency.
Solution
Easylot decided to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve this problem. They adopted a relatively novel method in the industry, simulated annealing, which is based on the natural heat treatment process of metals. This innovative algorithm examines a wide range of possible solutions, gradually narrowing down the field, and increasingly accepting only improvements as it traverses various potential solutions. The method’s heating and cooling processes enable extensive mapping of the state space, minimizing the risk of getting stuck in local optima.
Results and Benefits
The introduction of the AI-based approach proved to be a tremendous success. The algorithm can find the best possible offer within 1-2 seconds with only a 1-2% deviation. This speed and accuracy represent incredible value for Easylot’s customers, as they receive the best offers almost instantly. Additionally, Easylot itself gained significant benefits, as running the AI incurs no additional costs, thanks to the efficiently designed infrastructure.
Technology Stack
The technological backbone of the Easylot project relies on modern solutions such as serverless architecture which runs on AWS cloud. Each calculation runs in a Lambda environment, meaning resources are paid for based only on actual usage time, eliminating unnecessary costs. This approach is not only cost-effective but also allows Easylot to fully exploit the advantages offered by AI and cloud-based services.
