Do It Best launches innovation hub to develop AI plans

Executives at hardware and lumber retailer Do It Best didn’t want innovation to take a back seat to the extensive work needed to integrate two IT systems after the company acquired competitor True Value in late 2024.

A year after the acquisition, the company announced a new innovation hub in Dallas focused on AI and other emerging technologies, and it officially opened in January.

The tech hub will push Do It Best’s IT mission forward by concentrating on data, intelligence, and ease of use, says Ken Widner, the company’s executive vice president and CIO. The company plans to hire about 25 IT professionals for the center, including data scientists, software developers, and user experience experts.

“With the acquisition of True Value, we have to be able to focus on merging systems and figuring out what the combined infrastructure is going to look like from a technology perspective,” he says. “But at the same time, we can’t lose sight of our members and dealers and technology that they need to be successful and run their stores.”

With technology advancing at a rapid pace, executives realized that incremental changes to existing Do It Best IT resources weren’t going to be enough to push innovation forward as the company simultaneously pulled in True Value’s IT systems, Widner says.

One top priority for the innovation hub will be to build AI tools to help stores better serve customers, he adds. “Everyone’s talking about AI, and we know it’s a game changer for our industry,” he says. “We can’t just take our foot off the gas when it comes to new technology and strategy just to work on integration stuff.”

Predicting store needs

One AI project will focus on predicting inventory needs at Do It Best and True Value stores around the US, so that, for example, stores in areas facing unexpected winter storms have enough shovels and ice melt pellets in stock.

The company is also using AI to map product SKU codes at Do It Best and True Value to look for overlap between the two chains, Widner says.

The hub will also help stores make data-backed decisions, using predictive analytics, to decide what products to carry, based on factors like the age of the homes in the surrounding area. For example, a store in an area with a lot of housing built in the 1950s might carry more roofing supplies than a store in an area with homes built in the past 10 years.

“The hub is helping our members decide what products they should carry and when it comes to how they’re performing and how they compare to their peers in the same marketplaces,” Widner says. “We can provide technology now and help provide them data to be able to make better decisions, to really grow top-line sales and then ultimately provide products and services that we know the consumer wants.”

Gearing up

While Widner has high hopes for the innovation hub, the project did present challenges, mostly related to recruiting and onboarding new employees, he says. As the company hired, it realized the need to tweak some of its onboarding process.

“When you’re talking about hiring the number of engineers that we’re hiring, getting them up to speed and being productive was something that we wanted to focus on ahead of time,” he says. “We had a lot of our technical leads and senior engineers really dive into what our onboarding process looked like and how we could optimize it, updating our documentation and putting it in locations where people can get access to it.”

The new location also created support challenges, and Do It Best needed to pay special attention to ensure that the new IT team in Dallas had access to laptops and other essential equipment.

“Some of the challenges actually were more on the operational side around making sure that the facility was ready,” Widner says. “The badge reader was in place. We had a refrigerator, a microwave, keyboards and mice and stuff on people’s desks, whiteboards in place. Those were some of the things that we were rushing around and finishing up at the last minute.”

Integration still important

Meanwhile, the company has continued to integrate IT teams and systems between Do It Best and True Value after the acquisition doubled the company’s number of stores to about 9,000.

Widner’s team has looked for best-of-breed IT solutions at both companies, instead of requiring True Value stores and facilities to adopt Do It Best technologies. The IT team took about a year to evaluate the tech stacks at the two merging companies.

“We really wanted to be strategic on our approach and not come in with an assumption that we’re just going to lift and shift True Value systems onto the Do It Best system,” he adds. “We really wanted to look at things that we think we do well on the Do It Best side and the things that True Value did well on their side, and how do we get to a best of breed?”

The Do It Best approach to innovation and integration seems to be a thoughtful one, says one outside expert. An innovation hub, or center of excellence, is a good idea, especially for AI when there are so many ways to fail when adopting the technology, says Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president and general manager for worldwide infrastructure research at IT analyst firm IDC.

With most enterprise IT teams focused on day-to-day operational needs, an innovation hub can give IT leaders time to think strategically about AI adoption, he says.

“Even in the best of best IT organizations, the focus is on just running the thing,” Nadkarni says. “They’re focused on making sure that the bread-and-butter business of the company is not interrupted by any incidents. A lot of times, people don’t have the cycles, the bandwidth, to take a step back and think about the big picture.”

The True Value acquisition can add complexity to the way the combined company thinks about AI, and an innovation hub can help bring the two companies’ ideas together, he adds.

“Every company’s AI implementation is going to look different,” Nadkarni says. “When the two companies are brought together, their AI initiatives might not even look like each other, and you can’t just take the two together and put them in one place. You have to really think through it.”