Ingram Micro’s Global Business Intelligence & Analytics Center drives profitable growth partnering with Dun & Bradstreet
Founded in 1979, Ingram Micro is a leader and innovator in technology and supply chain services and the world’s largest wholesale distributor of information technology products. With more than 200,000 reseller customers in 145 countries worldwide they are focused on helping businesses fully realize the promise of technology™—and maximize the value of the technology that they make, sell or use. This focus has fueled their rise to the 62nd ranked corporation in the FORTUNE 500®.
The Challenge: Access to Data and Insight to Drive the Best Decisions
Selling products globally from more than 1,300 manufacturers through 200,000 solution providers to over 10 million end customer businesses, no other company delivers as broad and deep a spectrum of technology and supply chain services to businesses around the world. Therefore Ingram’s transactional data assets has long been considered a differentiator for the company. Since 2007, Ingram Micro has partnered with Dun & Bradstreet to consistently build out their business intelligence & analytics practice. The goal was to extract actionable predictive intelligence from the transactional data after triangulating that with a number of 2nd and 3rd party data sources such as D&B, and building highly scalable machine learning algorithms on that single version of truth.
The Solution: The Ingram Micro Business Intelligence Center
The Ingram Micro – Dun & Bradstreet partnership began in 2007 with a focus on the use of data and insights to drive more efficient decisions. Ingram Micro was using D&B Optimizer to match and append data on end-user customers. Their goal was to understand basic firmographic data, company buying entities and corporate linkage.
At the time, the Business Intelligence team consisted of three people with no centralized data warehouse. Ingram’s transaction and reporting data was dispersed throughout the organization. D&B and Ingram began to centralize and standardize the data flow.
Today, the Ingram Micro Business Intelligence Center (BIC) has more than 30 data analysts and scientists hard at work exploring the use of data to drive more profitability for the company. Since 2011, the group has generated $1.3 billion of incremental product revenue and $42 million of incremental gross profit including marketing services revenue through data-driven BI programs.
Many of the leading high tech firms have products in the market from Ingram. They are starting to run innovative data-driven to partner and through partner campaigns for many of these companies. Dun & Bradstreet is proud to be a trusted resource and more than just a data provider with contributions to Ingram Micro’s entire data eco-system and specifically these critical capabilities:
- Matching
- Global and Domestic Data
- Linkage
- Best Practices: email marketing
How It Works
In the U.S. the Business Intelligence Center supports more the 40,000 active resellers processing more than 30M annual orders. Leveraging Dun & Bradstreet data, the BIC has developed a significant number of use cases such as:
- End user demand gen in B2B2B
- End User Technology Index, next purchase sequence, context sensitive upsell and cross sell path
- New account prioritization
- Best Practices: email marketing
- List appending with D-U-N-S® as primary key
- Vertical Market Reporting
- Contacts augmentation
- Best Practices: email marketing
- POS Match back (drop ship data)
- End user analytical modeling and predictive lead scoring
D&B and Ingram have now expanded their relationship to replicate the U.S. services to a global footprint.
Meet the Masters of BI and Data Analytics
“Dun & Bradstreet is a trusted source of data for us. We rely on the D-U-N-S Number as a unique key…” Jeet Mukherjee, Vice President of Global BI and Analytics
“The matching capabilities of Dun & Bradstreet are the most sophisticated available on commercial data...” Reeto Mookherjee, Ph.D., Executive Director of Global BI and Analytics