Ads by TechWords

See your link here
Receive the latest technology news and information.
Computerworld Daily News (First Look and Wrap-Up)
Computerworld Blogs Newsletter
The Weekly Top 10
Cloud Computing
View all newsletters




Privacy Policy
 

United Pipe & Supply Co.: Staying Stocked During Disaster

When Katrina shut down its suppliers, this distributor used BI to prioritize its needs

September 18, 2006 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Many companies still haven't recovered from last year's hurricanes. United Pipe & Supply Co., however, managed to keep growing despite supply shortages.

The storm shut down chemical plants along the Gulf Coast that produce the plastic resin used for making PVC pipe. For most pipe dealers, that meant coping with soaring prices, if they could even find pipe to buy. United Pipe & Supply, however, found it could use its business intelligence software to maintain its supply lines by ordering only the exact items it needed at a given point in time.

United Pipe & Supply Co.

This privately held wholesale pipe, pump and hardware distributor is based in Portland, Ore., with 31 branches in the Pacific Northwest and $200 million in annual sales.

•  Project champions: Ed Kolasinski, president; Cheryl Summers, controller; Mike Green, CIO and vice president of operations
•  IT department: 10 employees
•  Payback: By conducting critical-item analyses of its inventory and supplying that data to its suppliers, United Pipe & Supply was able to continue serving its customers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
"I did some quick analysis in FileMaker and made some decisions on how much product to purchase, from whom, where to ship it from and how to keep track of that," says Dan Kraxberger, purchasing vice president. He customized a report to generate a critical-items analysis. He then sent the analysis to each vendor, so they knew exactly which items were most needed. The data was continually updated based on vendor feedback. "Where everybody else was asking to just ship them everything, we were saying that if you can just ship us these items, it will work out," Kraxberger says.

As a result, while competitors were running out of stock, United Pipe was able to keep its regular customers supplied. Instead of a disaster, the company had record-setting months during that time period.

United Pipe & Supply has transformed many aspects of its business operations using BI software. The company's pretax profit margin increased from 1.5% in 2003 to 4.7% in 2005, and in the past two years, its income before tax has risen from $2 million to $8.2 million.

Mike Green, CIO and vice president of operations at United Pipe
Mike Green, CIO and vice president of operations at United Pipe
Image Credit:
Robbie McCLaren
"We have raised the bar on the performance of the company," says Mike Green, United Pipe's CIO and vice president of operations. "We are growing the company, but we are also squeezing more to the bottom line through the use of these tools." While he doesn't attribute the improvements solely to the


Jump to comments

last September

Additional Resources

WHITE PAPER
Approximately 60 percent of data migration projects overrun time or budget, while some fail completely. Download this white paper, "Enhancing Your Chance for Successful Data Migration," to learn the critical steps you need to take to execute a data migration project with minimum cost and risk to your business.
WHITE PAPER
Read the Gartner research note to learn why the TCO of a server-based computing deployment used to deliver all applications to users is around 50% lower than that of an unmanaged desktop deployment.
WHITE PAPER
Economic downturns have a tendency to accelerate emerging technologies, boost the adoption of effective solutions, and punish solutions that are not cost competitive or that are out of synch with industry trends. This IDC White Paper presents the results of an IDC survey of 330 companies in Western Europe, Asia/Pacific and the Americas that measures the receptiveness to Linux and takes into consideration changing views driven by the disruptive economic environment that businesses face today.
 

SAS Information Management Kit

SAS is the leader in business intelligence and analytical software and services. Only SAS offers leading data integration, storage, analytics and business intelligence applications within a comprehensive enterprise intelligence platform. SAS gives 97 of the top 100 companies in the 2007 Fortune 500 THE POWER TO KNOW®.

Webcast: The Information Management Roadmap
Imagine high-quality data, cleansed, analyzed and delivered throughout your organization. Join Computerworld, IT visionary Thornton May and a panel of experts to learn how SAS® can help you make it happen.

View this webcast 
Research Report: Information Management Initiatives at Midsize and Large Organizations
See the top-line results of this Computerworld sponsored survey to see how IT and business leaders are handling information management implementation.

Download this report 
White Paper: Information Management: Better Information for Winning Decisions.
This white paper explains how the SAS Information Evolution Model aids companies in assessing how they use this information to make strategic decisions and drive business.

Download this white paper