Case Study: Ace Hardware achieves real-time POS insights and optimized inventory and pricing with Informatica

ACE Hardware increased developer productivity 60 percent with PowerCenter

Ace Hardware, a leading hardware wholesaler and retailer with more than 4,800 independently and company-owned stores across all 50 U.S. states and 72 countries, needed to modernize its retail reporting to maintain its service-based, local-retailer model. The company had to analyze POS data in near real-time, enrich product content for better search and ordering, and integrate wholesale and inventory data with POS systems — but reporting was up to a week old, sales couldn’t be accurately tracked or forecasted, and custom-coded integrations created performance and resource bottlenecks.

Using Informatica PowerCenter, Ace integrated critical POS data from 1,500 retail locations with wholesale and inventory systems to support sales, marketing, and pricing analysis. Real-time POS analysis sped replenishment and reduced inventory holding costs, improved pricing and margins (for example, standardizing higher-performing store prices), and enabled more effective customer targeting through trend and historical-buying analysis — turning Informatica into the company’s go-to platform for data movement and integration.

Ace Hardware

Mark Cothron

Data Warehouse Architect