Wesco's customers cross most industries: from Boeing to Dow Chemical to PepsiCo. It has a highly distributed organization with 370 branches and eight distribution centers. Yet the corporate office in Pittsburgh did not have real-time acess to inventory at the branch level and supplies could not be shifted among branches to meet demand. It could not quickly drill down to customer-level information and month-end sales analysis reports processed in 80 hours.

Wesco was comfortable with its distributed point-of-sale system, WesNet. However, officials knew an IT upgrade was necessary to obtain the data being sent to headquarters through WesNet faster.

Company officials turned to Oracle to crunch numbers and in testing, Oracle projected bringing the month-end sales analysis down to just 28 hours. Shortly thereafter, Oracle began implementation of a new data warehouse.

After an inquiry from Teradata, Wesco officials provided Teradata with the opportunity to beat Oracle's best time - although they did not expect Teradata to be successful. Much to their surprise, Teradata not only beat Oracle's best processing time by 26 hours, but the Teradata team crunched the data analysis down to a modest 75 minutes.

Using the Teradata Warehouse as backbone, Wesco has constructed a number of applications more often associated with ERP suites. Salespeople receive a morning report noting the previous day's billings and can drill down to see individual customer or supplier accounts. As a result, Wesco has saved an incredible amount of money with its investment: spending only $10 million on its Teradata investment compared to a $110 million industry-norm price tag for an ERP system.

Wesco says it achieved a $4 million savings in the first 24 months plus an additional $1 million in annual savings. And, it's also realized an $8 million one-time gain through inventory reduction and better distribution of inventory among branches.

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