WinWholesale is a leading supplier of domestic and industrial supplies and materials headquartered in Ohio with over 520 wholesaling corporations specializing in various areas. They had an internally developed ERP and financial system and needed to drive grassroots adoption of business intelligence (BI) tools from the bottom up. Obstacles included monthly data feeds and expensive licensing, which they overcame by creating nightly data feeds and selecting the Microsoft BI suite. They built simple prompted web reports on sales and finances, trained users, and saw margin improvements and increased usage, critical to managing local operations. Future plans include graphical dashboards and projections with external market data.

1. BI Roadmap
May 6, 2010

2. Who are we?
WinWholesale is a leading supplier of domestic and industrial
supplies and materials
Headquartered in Dayton, Ohio.
Privately-held, consisting of more than 520 wholesaling
corporations, each specializing in
Plumbing
Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning, (HVAC) & Refrigeration
Industrial pipes, valves and fittings
Fastening hardware and industrial supplies
Electrical equipment
Pumps

3. What is our environment?
Internally developed iSeries based ERP and POS
Internally developed mainframe based financial system
Wintel / Java based intra- and inter-net web applications
Wintel based data warehouse
SQL Server backend
Cognos and Microsoft Data Access

4. What was our need?
Top down history
Historically, our BI target was executive staff
Challenge
Drive grass roots behavior change
Bottom up future
Information delivered to local company
Actionable / Insightful
Historical and forward looking
Internal and external

5. Obstacles
What were they?
Data warehouse was only receiving monthly feeds
Desired behavior changes required more than financial data
Needed pricing, customer interaction, and purchasing.
Named-user licensing scheme was too expensive to deploy for all
How did we deal with them?
Created a nightly invoice detail feed to our data warehouse
Evaluated open source BI tools and Microsoft BI suite
Settled on the MS BI suite

6. What we did
Built a simple set of prompted web reports
Sales and financial data provided compelling value
Heavy on the graphical representation
Included reporting usage of the tool
Worked with our operations leadership team
Developed a playbook to define how to get maximum value
Then we built the plays into our reports
Providing Webex training to the potential local company users
Worked closely with a variety local company leaders
Fine tuned the usability of the reports

7. What are the results?
COO identified $2M worth of margin improvement in the first 3
months of release
Usage has grown 200% since January 2010
Tool has quickly become critical to managing our local company
operations

8. Where are we going?
Graphical dashboards for our local companies
Rolled up dashboard for operations hierarchy
Drill through to details for both
Monthly and Annual Projections
Include external market data

9. Questions?

10. Questions?