Customers
Success Story | Lutron
Take a look at how two trading partners made Net Price into Stock via Industry Data Warehouse (IDW) benefit both the manufacturer and the distributor.
Background:
Lutron Electronics Co., Inc., headquartered in Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, is the world's leading designer and manufacturer of lighting controls, lighting control systems and shading solutions for residential and commercial applications.
Van Meter Industrial is an employee owned electrical wholesaler with locations throughout Iowa. Today they have more than 300 employee owners who all have the same goal to make things easier for their customers.
Challenge:
Van Meter was in need of a solution to make the receipt of supplier net pricing a more efficient process to reduce manual repetitive work. They needed Net Pricing information in a timely manner and uniform format from their suppliers. Unfortunately it does not happen that way, adding unnecessary disorder and confusion.
"Without IDW I lose all current changes and future information—which I don't want to do. Suppliers need to understand that distributors want their data from one source not multiple sources," said Joe Wallace, Administration Manager, Van Meter Industrial.
Solution:
During a session discussing Net Price into Stock, Van Meter, one of Lutron's distributors made a request to the suppliers in attendance to provide this information through IDW.
"Since this was the number one request of the distributors and Lutron's number one principle is to 'Take Care of the Customer', I knew right away my job was to go back to work and reprioritize," said Leo Gould, Information Systems Manager, Lutron Electronics.
Lutron began supplying their net pricing data to Van Meter via IDW shortly thereafter. Since IDW already contains an extraction and import process to automatically translate this data, Van Meter was able to bypass the manual processes needed to translate the data on each disk including loading, processing, sending and downloading.
Result:
Lutron's input of this information saved Van Meter on labor, brought efficiency gains to the company, allowed for quicker system updates and mostly, provided them with all the features to use IDW.