Extension of the Supply Chain link

About the Business
The distribution subsidiary of WESCO International Inc. supplies electrical products and maintenance/repair/operations(MRO) for commercial and industrial purposes.

Operations and Issue
WESCO distribution not only stocks more than 140,000 items from various manufacturers but also offers its customers various MRO products which it wouldn'tstock and then arrange it from various suppliers. Whenever WESCO received orders of the items for which they didn't maintain stock, it would take themextra pain to call up the suppliers/manufacturers in order to find out the pricing and availability data before they get back to their customers. Though only 20% of the total orders constituted the Non stock items but the it took around 40% of the salesperson's time to relay the desired information back to the customer.

Solution
To address this issue, the company built a new software which connected the Mainframe "Legacy" System of WESCO with the heterogenous systems of the supplierfor inbound and outbound communication. This helped WESCO in relaying the information of the non stock items to their customers within 30 seconds as the information of the same was now available just a click away.

Mathematics
The cost to implement such a system was about $400,000 and the savings were around $12 million annually as it saved them $75 per hour for each salesperson.

Benefits to

1) WESCO

a) Customer Perception: It moved towards the positive as WESCO was able to answer the customers' queries and supply to them the goods they were looking for.
b) Data Accessibility: Branches of WESCO were able to access the Non Stock Item Information online.
c) Cost Reduction: WESCO started to represent the suppliers for Stock Items too in order to reduce inventory maintenance and save cost.

2) SUPPLIER

a) The supplier was able to connect to the customer directly through this channel