30,000 product lines classified per buying decision, in a week, for FARO
For every container purchase, FARO needed to categorise around 30,000 product lines to estimate margin, sale price, and stock time before committing capital. Pearstop automated the classification and linked it directly to FARO’s sales database.
Why margin was invisible until after the purchase
For each container purchase, FARO needed a reliable cost picture before committing capital. That meant classifying thousands of product lines, linking them to sales outcomes, and keeping the process fast enough to support the buying decision itself.
Before Pearstop, this was two people’s job: flagging every incoming product line by hand, and mapping each one to a category by hand. Without automation, the work was repetitive, slow, and hard to scale.
This project predates general-purpose LLMs becoming viable for this kind of work. Pearstop built the classification system for FARO using machine learning and its own purpose-built technology, not a large language model — proof the underlying approach holds up without leaning on the newest tooling.
How Pearstop estimates margin before the purchase
Automatic classification
Pearstop classified 95% of the items in under a week, using the company's own category logic.
Sales-linked margin view
The dataset was linked to sales information so buyers could see margin before the purchase happened.
Decision speed
The team stopped spending days on manual categorisation and got a clean basis for the buying decision itself.
We had thousands of product lines that needed to be categorised before we could even begin to understand our costs. Pearstop classified them in under a week. That would have taken our team six months and still would not have been this accurate.
David TorrCEO, FAROFrom manual flagging to an automated flow
The team moved from manual categorisation to an automated flow that could keep up with buying decisions. That made margin visible earlier and reduced the operational drag on the procurement team.
A more reliable basis for planning
With classification no longer the bottleneck, FARO has a more reliable basis for planning and analysis across every buying decision, not just the ones there was time to review by hand.
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