Case Study: Ace Hardware Corporation achieves retail transformation and $85M annual ROI with Teradata

New Retail Focus and Customer Insight Make Ace Hardware a Fast-Growing Place

Ace Hardware, the 4,600‑store cooperative known as “The Helpful Place,” faced a growing competitive threat in the 2000s as big‑box retailers leveraged end‑to‑end retail data. Ace’s decentralized stores used heterogeneous POS systems and limited network access, leaving corporate blind to retail transactions; its initial SQL warehouse was overloaded and the Helpful Hardware Club loyalty program had to be paused as data volumes grew.

Ace built an enterprise data warehouse (Teradata) with Informatica and MicroStrategy, bringing thousands of stores and the HHC into a single platform. Query times fell from days to hours/minutes, HHC membership scaled toward 11 million, targeted campaigns doubled response rates (5% to 10%), same‑customer sales rose substantially, and an internal audit attributed roughly $85M in annual ROI to higher transaction value, increased visit frequency and improved margins.

Ace Hardware Corporation

Frank Murphy

Manager of Retail IT