Wolseley Group is the UK's largest specialist trade merchant in plumbing, heating and cooling, turning over roughly two and a half billion pounds a year across the UK and Ireland. It operates around 700 locations, employs thousands of people, and its customer base ranges from individual plumbers buying a tap fitting to major construction firms spending fifty million pounds a year. It was acquired by Clayton, Dubilier & Rice from Ferguson in 2021 and earlier this year announced a restructured operating model built around four customer-focused divisions.
It's also in the middle of a significant technology transformation - one that its CTO, Roger Connett, describes with a pragmatism that comes from having lived through the failures that preceded it. Connett said:
We've had a number of goes over the last 20 years, both as part of Wolseley and previously as part of Ferguson, at large ERP-type programmes. They all ended very badly and very expensively. So about 10 to 15 years ago we said, look, we can't do this just from a technology perspective - it has to be a people, process, cultural change management perspective as well.
That rethink led Wolseley to break the transformation into modular pieces rather than attempting another big bang rollout. The finance systems have been running on Oracle Cloud for around eight years and integration and supply chain followed over the last three to four years. Now comes what Connett calls the branch modernization programme - replacing the green screen legacy technology that runs every customer-facing transaction.
Not retail
Wolseley's challenge is that it looks deceptively simple from the outside but is far more complex underneath. As Connett explains, this is not a traditional retail environment, as customers have specific pricing. Orders might be sourced from fifteen different suppliers and a single visit could be a one-item counter sale or the start of a project spanning six months. It's a combination of CRM, ERP and supply chain all rolled into one transaction. Connett said:
Our customers could be anywhere from a single plumber coming in to buy one or two products, all the way up to some of the biggest construction companies in the country buying fifty million pounds worth of products a year from us. We sell on credit. Everybody has specific pricing. Quite often we'll be making a promise for an order that might be sourced from fifteen different suppliers.
Every time Wolseley has tried to put a standardized front end into its branches, that's where the problems have started. So the current approach uses Oracle Fusion SCM as the core platform, extended via Oracle Cloud to build a user interface that actually fits the business. The plan is to go live in a single branch in October or November this year - taking a deliberately small, deliberately cautious approach.
The ability to start in one location, and learn from it, is key to good risk management. Connett said:
One of the things that can put an enterprise at risk in an ERP programme is the scale of the rollout. Our ability to go live in a single location - understand it, learn from it, test it, start to scale it, iron out the process kinks - that's critical.
Crucially, the architecture means that customer invoicing, pricing and costing all still run through the same upstream processes regardless of whether a branch is on the new or old technology. A customer like British Gas, trading across all of Wolseley's locations, won't see a difference.
A business of consequences
When it comes to the adoption of AI, Connett describes Wolseley as a "business of consequences". This is not a consumer e-commerce company where a delayed delivery means someone being slightly put out. Connett said:
If we let service down - it's not that someone hasn't got their jumper for the weekend. That plumber's business suffers because he can't deliver what he promised his customer. On large building sites, if our products aren't there on time with a full schedule of works before and afterwards, that's hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds. If we put the wrong valve at the bottom of a hospital, it's not replacing a £4.99 valve - it's shutting the hospital down for a week.
That’s a big responsibility and it sets the tone for how Wolseley thinks about deploying AI. There is plenty of talk across the enterprise technology market about agentic AI and autonomous workflows - Oracle itself recently announced twenty-two new Fusion Agentic Applications aimed at shifting Fusion from a system of record to a system of outcomes. But Connett's position is that the way through it is not trying to do everything at once. He said:
Just knock off the easy 80 percent first, and we'll figure out the last 20% over the next three years. Or we won't - and that's okay, because you'll still have delivered the value in the first 80 percent.
The quotation process
Connett's go-to use case is the quotation cycle - not glamorous, but a huge part of what Wolseley does every day. Today, a customer emails a quote request that lands in a branch inbox. Someone interprets it, as the customer might use manufacturer codes, descriptions, or something else entirely rather than Wolseley's own product codes. That person keys it into the system, applies pricing, downloads the quote, emails it back, chases it, wins or loses it, then turns it into an order. The cycle takes three or four days. Connett believes AI can compress that to twenty minutes. He said:
“I still think people are involved in that process, but they're involved to validate the last five percent. What is currently three hours of someone's time - taking the order, interpreting it, keying it in, doing the quote, checking the pricing, sending it to the customer, following up, and processing the order - we have literally hundreds of people doing that today.
The broader point is about where AI should sit. Connett said that the real opportunity is in getting AI embedded into core operational flows, not in peripheral use cases. He said:
“Everybody's got AI examples - contract management, writing job descriptions - but cracking AI right at the heart of your business processes is where 90 percent of our people are employed, and that's where most of the opportunity is.
And the benefit isn't purely about cost. If Wolseley can consistently turn around customer enquiries within minutes rather than days, that changes the Group’s competitive proposition.
Bringing up the bottom third
Interestingly, Connett also has some good insights about where the real productivity gains sit when it comes to AI (something many businesses are struggling to figure out). Wolseley has always had roughly a third of branches that perform brilliantly, a third that are okay, and a third that aren't where they need to be. Connett said:
As we put the modern platform in place, it may not make the top third materially better - but it will absolutely bring up the bottom third.
I often think a lot of the productivity improvements are in the straightforward things, not the complex ones. Go and make the easy stuff work first. That's where the biggest opportunity is.
He points to staff turnover as the clearest example. It takes three to six months to learn Wolseley's legacy systems. Roughly a third of people who join the organization leave within the first year. If the new platform can make those joiners productive after a week rather than three months, the maths speaks for itself. Connett said:
If I could make the 1,000 people a year who join us and leave within a year productive after a week rather than three months - that's a massive opportunity right there. Start there, and figure out step two, step three, and step four afterwards.
People do weird and wonderful things
Connett is also refreshingly honest about the human side. He tells a story about what happened when Wolseley deployed the SCM solution to rethink how distribution centers worked. The logic was that the company would keep inventory centralized until a branch really needed it, because once it's spread across 700 branches it's expensive to move back if an order gets cancelled. Ship from the distribution centre on Wednesday for a Thursday promise date.
But branch managers, entrepreneurial and customer-focused, weren't comfortable with that. They started pulling promise dates forward to get stock into branches early and secure it - even though the orchestration was handling it in the background. Connett said:
I don't say that as an example of right or wrong. It's just that AI isn't only about technology. People are part of that conversation too, and they're going to do some weird and wonderful things along the journey that you cannot predict.
His advice to other CIOs and CTOs? Communicate relentlessly, manage expectations carefully at pilot stage, and - most importantly - go and find the use cases where the work actually happens. He said:
Everyone is looking for AI use cases, but I don't think many of them exist in the boardroom. Most of them exist when you go and spend time with your colleagues in the branches. Go and talk to the people in the distribution centres picking 1,000 orders a day. The use cases just fall out when you do that.