Read the full Whayne Supply success story here

Read more about Verian’s solutions for Caterpillar dealerships

Whayne Supply is a 1,000-employee Caterpillar dealership headquartered in Louisville, KY. Hundreds of employees across 16 locations purchase millions of dollars in mechanical parts, services and supplies each year.

Although Whayne is one of the few Caterpillar dealerships in North America with a centralized purchasing department that negotiates supplier contracts, they still lacked quality, aggregated data that would reveal opportunities for even better negotiating leverage.

After a thorough selection process involving several competing vendors, Whayne selected Verian Technologies. Verian’s Web-based purchase-to-pay software solution with sophisticated purchasing automation capabilities exceeded all of Whayne’s functional and technical requirements. Verian enabled Whayne to start conducting spend analyses to get a better grip on their purchasing habits.

The better negotiating power is paying off as well. Soon after launching Verian’s applications, one of Whayne’s largest vendors agreed to eliminate freight charges on all shipments – amounting to $20,000 in annual savings.

Even beyond the free shipping, Whayne started using data from the system to negotiate discounts from 5-15% on purchases with the same vendor.

Verian’s purchasing solution enabled Whayne to reduce a 15-step purchasing process down to eight. Whayne’s online catalogs are now pre-populated with up-to-date vendor pricing and item information. The process is completely automated, including purchase order delivery, so there is no paperwork to send or calls to make.

As a result, it now takes just four minutes to issue a purchase order. And the average cost of issuing, receiving and paying an invoice is now $12.60, for an annual total of $630,000. In just over five years, this has saved Whanyne Supply $3,532,200.

Whayne Supply has radically transformed the way they conduct purchasing — in a relatively painless fashion. With Verian’s help, Whayne solved their most challenging issues, including: off-contract buying, lack of reliable data for negotiations, lost service billings and inefficient approval procedures.

“I’ve been very impressed with the quality of service we’ve received from Verian,” said Les Long, director of purchasing for Whayne Supply. “They understand purchasing and quickly grasped the nature of the challenges we were facing here at Whayne. The Verian professional services team was able to work with our staff to implement the system much faster than I’ve ever seen a comparable system implemented.”