WhereScape’s Data Vault modernization solutions helped US Lumber integrate disparate ERP data into a single source of truth and reduce the time to assimilate data from newly acquired companies by 50%.

The Problem

US Lumber, a specialty construction products distributor, has been in acquisition mode for the past eight years and has acquired over 30 distribution and manufacturing centers in Canadian provinces and Washington state. With the acquisitions, the team of 200 grew to over 3,000. This prosperity meant much work for the data team of three, led by US Lumber’s BI Manager, Marc Porlier, who makes up a small chunk of the 22-person IT department.

When a new acquisition is made, the team must map and assimilate often disparate data source systems and naming conventions into their own data warehouse. To make matters more complicated, the legacy data warehouse was custom-built and wasn’t sufficiently robust or scalable. US Lumber has five ERP systems feeding into the data warehouse and will potentially have more in the future.

The Solution

WhereScape provided US Lumber the ability to get a Data Vault into a business vault, and out to the data marts. WhereScape RED enabled data-driven design by letting developers make models with their actual data via a drag-and-drop GUI, then use a code generator to physicalize the model by automatically writing thousands of lines of code in seconds. Additionally, the WhereScape data automation solution provided out-of-the-box templates that reduced the time to assimilate data from newly acquired companies by 50%.