Allison Huffman

Director -Platform, Wesco

It is a world leader in Electrical, Communications, Utility Distribution and Supply Chain Services.
• Founded in 1922 as Westinghouse Electric Supply Company (Wesco).
• Distribution arm with a focus on Westinghouse-branded lighting and electrical products
• Provide natural gas and electrical power to cities, rail lines, and roads from coast to coast.

Supernova Award Category: 
Next-Generation Customer Experience
The Problem: 

From 2010 to 2022 Wesco International acquired 26 companies, the biggest of which was the USD 4.5 billion merger of Wesco and Anixter International. This has resulted in 10 different CRM systems having 150,000 customers, 30,000 suppliers, 1,500,000 products, 10,000 CRM users, and 10 fully automated Distribution centers spread across 800 branches in 50 countries. The newly formed hybrid company had productivity and efficiency goals that needed to be addressed and some of the major challenges it faced were:

• Distinct CRM systems being used by Wesco and Anixter
• Difference in Customer experience approach
• Segregated data across the IT application stack
• Reduced sales productivity
• No uniform and defined business processes
• No integrated front-office user experience
• Lack of single source of truth for unified 360o view & reporting.

The Solution: 

The business process was redesigned using CRM capabilities of Lead and Opportunity Management – Quick views, Business Process Flows, embedding Canvas Apps & PBI Tiles, Custom Pages, PCF Controls for Address Doctor Integration, Customer Insights, Relationship Assistant. Custom business logic was implemented using Access teams to meet complex security model requirement and sales planning process was developed using Canvas/Model-driven Application to meet Custom UI requirement. Using POWER BI, near Real-time dashboards & reports providing a visualization of the consolidated data from sources like Dynamics 365 CRM, Azure Synapse, Excel and Share point are implemented into a single dataset with level Customer and Sales insights, with a 360-degree customer view for informed decision making. Combined capabilities of Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM were used to help WESCO and their sales team into data details using Desktop & Mobile Dashboards

The Results: 

The overall impact has led to a best of its class CRM tool that is truly the one-stop-shop for the organization with even more to come, and from a very passionate team that cares about the tool and its users. Wesco and Infosys have elevated the Dynamics tool.  Recalling the territory management example, the business impact of this solution has given Wesco their first-ever all-in-one territory management platform. It not only saves time for sales managers, but also gives them meaningful insights on how best to optimize their territories. Additionally, it gives the managers opportunities to provide feedback that drives the algorithms feeding into the solution. Territory management is just one of the many examples. Infosys team and the Unified Sales Desk is going to provide Wesco many of their “firsts” and once fully released, our sales team will be a force to be reckoned with!

Metrics: 

• Cost Savings by USD 600M annually by sales planning application. A Canvas app was built for sales planning that increased sales productivity by reducing 80% of the sales planning effort.
• Increase in pipeline velocity per user by 7% due to significant growth in several opportunities; increase in success rates; increased deal size with the use of data, technology and processes; and average cycle time decrease.
• Increase in win rate by 4.7% (from 37 to 41%) by bringing everybody into common systems, providing better data, providing smoother interfaces and a better understanding of customers.

The Technology: 

• D365 Technology Landscape
• Dynamics 365 – Sales Enterprise
• Marketing
• Sales Co-Pilot
• Azure Cloud
• Power Platform
• Power BI

Disruptive Factor: 

Execution, Process gaps, Obscure Requirements, Data Validation and Deployment to multiple environments were the challenges faced, for which Infosys maintained SOPs like Deployment checklists, Resource onboarding checklists and Resource reskilling. We identified all possible scenarios and presented multiple options by creating design and analysis, user stories, and demos at every stage. We also defined comprehensive acceptance criteria before the sprint started. Design thinking sessions using the “Double Diamond” technique were streamlined to formalize the processes. Infosys also built the Power BI User Validation Tool to validate the User data, which resulted in reduction of 90% of the human effort in User setup validation, from the Source system to CRM. We also implemented an early detection & cleanup of dirty Data from the Source System before migration. Additionally, there was a 50% reduction of validation time with automation of the data validation process using macro-enabled XLS data sheets. Also, Cloned CRM environments to reduce the deployment efforts and used the Power BI deployment pipeline for PowerBi deployments which reduced the deployment defects and deployment effort by 90%.

Shining Moment: 

WESCO Legacy Applications like Salesforce, HubSpot, Eloqua and a few others were replaced by the D365 Customer Engagement Platform. Multiple D365 Stacks like Sales, Marketing, Power Platform etc., into a Single Tenant, resulted in wider visibility for WESCO, reducing IT Costs, and Process Simplification.  Improvement in fetching the reports from various legacy applications resulted in increased decision-making capability, visibility, and ROI.

About Wesco

It is a world leader in Electrical, Communications, Utility Distribution and Supply Chain Services.
• Founded in 1922 as Westinghouse Electric Supply Company (Wesco).
• Distribution arm with a focus on Westinghouse-branded lighting and electrical products
• Provide natural gas and electrical power to cities, rail lines, and roads from coast to coast.