How the people who know the work became the builders at Ewing

A century-old business with decades of knowledge in people's heads

Ewing Outdoor Supply is a 100-year-old, family-owned wholesale distributor of landscape and hardscape materials. The company operates 260 branches, and its long-tenured employees carry deep knowledge of its customers, products, and processes.

That experience is a competitive advantage — but it also meant many processes lived in the heads of a few people who had performed them for decades. The accounts payable team — the group that processes incoming supplier invoices — was the clearest example. Ewing received roughly 4,000 invoices every week, and five or six employees on that team spent their days entering data, each processing 400 to 500 invoices at a time.

The volume was punishing and the work was difficult to transfer. Training a new person meant trying to explain years of exceptions and tribal knowledge. Ewing tried the conventional route with consultants and a large software company, but the implementation created more work for the accounts payable team — the people who knew the process had to explain it to consultants, who then had to explain it to the people writing the code.

The breakthrough: let the accounts payable team own the automation

With Convey, the people performing the work could train the digital teammate directly. Employees on the accounts payable team walked it through the real process: read invoices from email, extract the required information, enter the invoice into P21, match it to the purchase order, handle freight, and manage exceptions.

That change in ownership was the key. Subject-matter experts could add an edge case the moment they encountered it, refine instructions in plain language, and verify the results themselves.

Once the core accounts payable workflow was working, the idea spread to other teams. Ewing now runs digital teammates across procurement, IT, accounting, fleet, facilities, sales, and Talent Resources — handling everything from freight-invoice dispatch and new-SKU creation to fiscal-month close tasks and fleet management.

From accounts payable to Talent Resources

Kylie, on Ewing's Talent Resources team, saw the same challenge in people operations: unique processes filled with exceptions and tribal knowledge that are difficult to document or hand to a new employee.

She began training a digital teammate by talking through the work in the same way she would with a colleague. When a new variable appeared, she added it. When she wanted to improve a process, she asked the teammate for recommendations and refined the workflow.

The impact changed Kylie's own role. Her manager asked her to expand beyond individual workflows and begin building processes and automations for the entire Talent Resources team. The person with the operating knowledge became the builder for her function.

Connected across the systems Ewing already uses

Ewing's teammates operate across its real technology stack — ERP, payroll, recruiting, fleet, and analytics tools — without requiring a rip-and-replace of the systems the business already runs on.

The deployment has also matured beyond simple task automation. Ewing is introducing stricter access and authoring controls for sensitive financial systems, while expanding into higher-value finance processes such as month-end close. The company's goal is to reduce a ten-day close to five days and automate a larger share of the roughly 200,000 transactions it processes every month.

The results

The original accounts payable deployment transformed a process that had required five or six people doing data entry every day. More importantly, it established a model Ewing can reuse: the employees who understand the process build and own the automation, and their expertise is redirected toward harder business problems.

That model is now shaping how the company thinks about growth. Instead of automatically adding headcount when a new operational need appears, leaders can first ask whether a digital teammate can absorb the repetitive work. The opportunity extends from invoice processing and month-end close to strategic projects such as acquisition-target monitoring and competitor research.

For a company with employees who have spent 10, 20, or even 40 years mastering the business, the goal is not to discard that knowledge. It is to multiply it.