Looking for a competitive edge

Irving Tyler, CIO of Quaker Chemical, a developer and producer of chemical specialty products for heavy industrial and manufacturing applications, has leveraged BA’s strengths to give his company an edge against larger rivals.

Tyler says Quaker always valued BI. “For us, it’s a combination of transactional data and experiential, qualitative knowledge,” he says. Quaker views its employees’ expertise in combination with the company’s IT as a vital competitive edge in a business where most competitors are 10 times its size. So Tyler was open to any advantages BA could offer. The firm expanded into BA using SAS Institute tools to create an application that cross-pollinates purchasing intelligence across its global operations. The result is what the company calls “arbitrage.”

“We’re not a purchasing powerhouse; while we’re large, we’re not big enough to always negotiate the best prices,” Tyler explains. “We collect raw materials’ availability and pricing data and apply analytics so a buyer in any region gets an arbitrage report. The buyer sees what they’re paying relative to similar materials and substitutes, in their region and others. You look somewhere else in the world, and [with BA you can] see it’s being sold cheaper,” Tyler adds.