Challenge:
Swagelok Albany and Texas Mid-Coast distributors were unable to leverage business data to easily answer questions about customers, inventory, or operations.

Solution:
Thanks to Domo, its distributors in Albany and Texas Mid-Coast now have complete, real-time access to inventory, sales, orders, web traffic, and more.

Impact:
The distributors use this data to proactively alleviate supply chain pressures while solidifying customer relationships.

Swagelok distributors improve customer connections with Domo.

The Swagelok Company is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of high-quality fluid system components. Operating through a network of independent sales and service centers, its products are found across North America, Europe, and Asia, not to mention on Mars: its fittings were used on Viking 1 on its mission to collect soil samples from the Red Planet.  

To better serve customers and manage supply chain challenges, Swagelok Texas Mid-Coast and Albany distributors rely on Domo to enable data-driven decision-making.

Uncovering understanding.

Before Domo, Meiklejohn said that Swagelok Albany found itself unable to efficiently leverage its business data. Information was spread across multiple systems, which could take hours to collect and process before it could be analyzed. “By that point, it was out of scope, so we were making decisions based on old data. Our decisions weren’t as strong as they could be,” she said. 

In addition, this lack of insight began to impact the customer experience. Swagelok Albany struggled to know whether it had the inventory in place to process a sales order or if its marketing analytics indicated buyer intent based on the web pages a customer spent time on. Sales staff would have to wait for reports to arrive in their inbox before taking action. 

Thanks to Domo, the distributors can now see everything from inventory to orders to web traffic on a single dashboard, allowing them to improve their customer experience and operational efficiency. For example, Swagelok Albany uses Domo to monitor its customer usage trends so that it can order materials in bulk to get better discounts without fear of being left with excess products. “We’re able to order those higher quantities with confidence, which makes our margins much better,” Meiklejohn said. 

By purchasing more in anticipation of customer orders, Swagelok’s distributors are able to proactively mitigate supply chain issues, improving the customer experience. “Domo helps us get out ahead of the game. We can commit to extra inventory so our customers don’t experience the lead time constraints they see with other suppliers,” Meiklejohn said.

“It would be a massive struggle to try to do this without the access to data that Domo provides,” said Kevin Moriarty, Distributor Principal at Swagelok Texas Mid-Coast.

Removing customer friction.

Domo’s automation is used throughout the organization to share data with both employees and customers. For example, Swagelok Albany uses Domo to send regular open order reports that are tailored to the information each client has requested to track. The report is created and sent automatically, freeing up customer support staff from having to manually process and send the report. 

Meanwhile, sales teams use Domo Alerts to monitor and manage everything from inventory issues to shipping dates so they can have proactive conversations with customers. Alerts are sent to staff on their phones so they’re always in the loop.

“The sales team is constantly looking at customer data on their phone before they head out to a site so they understand customer health across the board, and then they can direct the conversation when they’re out meeting with the customer,” Schaefer said. 

By leveraging customer data in Domo, sales teams are able to help customers better understand opportunities to save money by scheduling regular bulk orders instead of ordering products individually. This also helps the distributors have better visibility into lead times, ensuring products will be available.  

“We’re focused heavily on these Made to Orders. Domo really helped us get a snapshot of this so we can focus on where we can make changes to ensure we have the right stock available at the right time, which really helped our supply chain issues,” Schaefer said. “If there’s an issue, we’re now able to notify customers further ahead of time to let them know it will be delayed, rather than have a customer call us and ask where their parts are.” 

“Domo has completely transformed how we do business,” Meiklejohn said. “It has brought in a completely new data culture transformation that we could not have imagined.”