Retail · Data Analytics
137% sales uplift for Wickes suppliers with near real-time data
Wickes gave 200+ suppliers daily sales, stock and finance data. One supplier turned that visibility into a 137% week-on-week sales uplift.
Headline result
137%
week-on-week sales uplift for one supplier acting on portal data
Supplier using the portal137%
Category market leader50%
Week-on-week sales growth in the same category, same period.
CLIENT
Wickes (retail arm of Travis Perkins plc at project start)
SECTOR
Retail
TIME TO VALUE
Two-month go-live on the rebuild
CHALLENGE
Suppliers received raw data, not insight, from a legacy supplier system
SOLUTION
Supplier portal giving near real-time sales, stock, finance and marketing data
TECHNOLOGY
Qlik Analytics Platform, re-engineered on Coeus BI, hosted by Catalyst BI
The challenge
What problem was Wickes trying to solve?
Wickes suppliers could already see stock levels and sales volumes. What they could not do was act on them quickly.
The legacy supplier system, inherited from the wider Travis Perkins engagement, handed suppliers raw data and a handful of performance measures around availability, on time and in full. Suppliers paid for it. It generated revenue and kept the conversation going, but it stopped short of telling anyone what to do next.
That gap costs money on both sides. A supplier who cannot see which stores are selling through and which are sitting on stock ships to the wrong places. A retailer with 200+ suppliers and 600 colleagues, all working at different levels of data maturity, ends up running those conversations through email and spreadsheets.
Then there is the working pattern. Suppliers work Monday to Friday, nine to five. Retail sells seven days a week. Data that lands late is data that arrives after the decision has been made.
Before
–Raw data extracts, with suppliers left to work out the meaning
–Availability, on time and in full measures only
–Supplier questions answered by email and spreadsheet
–Weekend trading invisible until the following week
After
✓Daily sales, stock, finance and marketing data in one view
✓Regional performance a supplier can act on the same day
✓Suppliers self-serve through a browser, no BI licence needed
✓Stock moved toward the stores actually selling it
By this point, the system was ready for improvement, particularly on the merchant side.
Suppliers plan production and distribution against what stores are actually selling.
The solution
What did Catalyst BI build?
Travis Perkins approached Catalyst BI to support the roll-out of a new supplier solution, i-supply, aimed at its retail arm, Wickes. The brief was visibility: sales, finances, stock movement and the marketing activity behind their products, presented so a supplier could see its own position across Wickes stores.
Qlik was selected for its analytics and dashboarding. The Qlik Analytics Platform specifically, because it can push dashboard views and individual objects onto a web page for external consumption. That mattered. Suppliers are not internal users with BI licences. They are external parties who need a browser and nothing else.
Our data analytics consulting team joined the front-end design to the Qlik objects in the back-end data sets, and supported both the Travis Perkins internal team and its system integrator through build. We also hosted the solution.
The data models were complex. The constraint we worked to was not to over-engineer them. An over-scoped model would have looked impressive and performed badly, and a supplier portal that loads slowly is a supplier portal nobody opens.
How quickly did it go live?
Existing
Qlik selected for its analytics and dashboarding. i-supply built on the Qlik Analytics Platform and published to suppliers on the web.
Engagement
Travis Perkins splits out its retail side. Wickes needs its own version of i-supply inside its own environment.
Two months
Catalyst BI re-engineers the solution on Coeus BI rather than lifting and shifting. Go-live inside two months, faster and easier to navigate than the system it replaced.
Since
Suppliers onboarded onto daily data, with Catalyst BI hosting and supporting continuous improvement.
The results
What results did Wickes suppliers see?
137% sales uplift
Week on week for one supplier acting on portal data, against 50% for the market leader in the same category.
An 1,800-piece order surfaced
An unreceived order showed as stock on order, preventing a low-stock problem the supplier had no other way of seeing.
A 50 SKU priority list
Built by AkzoNobel during lockdown, telling its factories exactly what to keep producing while demand shifted.
Daily, not periodic
Sales, stock, finance and marketing data replaced periodic raw extracts, giving near real-time visibility across Wickes stores.
Regional performance tracking
Suppliers can see which areas are selling and move stock toward them instead of spreading it evenly.
200+ suppliers, one view
A supplier base at very different levels of data maturity working from the same daily numbers.
The 137% is the number that travels. The mechanism behind it matters more. Suppliers stopped guessing where their products were selling and started moving stock to match. When weekly category updates were disrupted for around four weeks during lockdown, suppliers used portal data alongside their own forecasts to keep production lines and distribution sites running.
This project flew. People can’t believe how quickly the project landed. A great example of the Catalyst way, agile enough to reprioritise to ensure Wickes’ customers are happy.
Sam GreenSupplier KRA Manager, Wickes
In their words
What did the suppliers say?
“Since the COVID-19 lockdown, the daily sales analysis and split of online and click and collect, and visibility of the distribution and weight of sales, has become invaluable. It enabled us to support our supply chain through more accurate forecasting and by identifying a 50 SKU priority list of products the factories could focus production on, whilst minimising lost sales.”
Yusuf AlharariSenior Customer Business Manager, AkzoNobel
“During lockdown SCA were able to use sales and stock data from i-supply, married to our internal forecasts, to keep our production lines running and our distribution site at Stoke fully operational. Without i-supply this would have been very much harder.”
Ken ReidyStrategic Account Manager, SCA Wood UK Ltd
What it means for you
What does this mean for other retail businesses?
A supplier portal is not a reporting project. It is a commercial one.
If you sell through a supplier base of any size, three conditions decide whether it works. That is the starting point for most retail data solutions.
01
Suppliers need data filtered to what they can act on, not a raw export of everything.
02
It has to reach them without a BI licence or a training course. A browser and a login.
03
It has to land before the decision, which in retail means daily at minimum.
Get those right and the portal pays for itself twice. Once in supplier performance, once in the internal hours you stop spending answering supplier questions by email.
Technology is the secondary decision. This was built on Qlik and later re-engineered on Coeus BI. A comparable portal today might sit on Qlik Cloud, Power BI Embedded, or a custom front end over Snowflake or Databricks. The data model discipline underneath does not change, which is the same lesson behind how Fenwick cut reporting costs by 40%.
Frequently asked questions
What is a retail supplier data portal?
A supplier data portal is a secure web application that gives your suppliers a filtered view of their own performance in your business: sales, stock positions, orders and availability. Suppliers log in through a browser. They see their products only, refreshed on a set schedule, with no access to competitor data.
How long does it take to build one?
The Wickes rebuild reached go-live in two months, but that followed an existing solution and a proven data model. A first build typically takes longer, and the timeline is driven by data readiness rather than the front end. If your sales and stock data is already modelled and trusted, you are most of the way there.
Do suppliers need BI software or training?
No. That is the point of publishing to a web page rather than a BI tool. Suppliers range widely in data maturity, and any portal that assumes analytical skill will be used by a fraction of them. Design for the least technical supplier on your list and the rest follow.
How often should supplier data refresh?
Daily is the practical minimum for retail. Suppliers typically work Monday to Friday while stores trade seven days, so weekend sales need to be visible first thing Monday. Anything slower and suppliers plan production and distribution against numbers that have already moved.
What data should you share with suppliers, and what should you hold back?
Share what a supplier can act on: their own sales, stock positions, orders on hold, regional performance and forecast demand. Hold back anything that reveals another supplier’s position, your margin, or commercially sensitive category strategy. The line is whether the data helps them serve you better.
Book a 30-minute supplier data review
We will look at what your suppliers can see today, what they could act on, and what stands between the two.