Selects CRM solution from Teradata after thorough vendor evaluation
Chicago — May 18, 2004 — Ace Hardware, the nation's largest cooperative of independently owned and operated hardware retailers, announced the purchase of the customer relationship management (CRM) suite from Teradata, a division of NCR Corp.
Implementation of the new solution, which includes campaign and promotion management, actionable analytics and communications applications, will begin this month and be completed by the third quarter of 2004.
Ace Hardware has been operating a Teradata Warehouse for nearly four years and uses the system to drive its customer loyalty program, the Helpful Hardware Club. At the same time, the co-op determined that it needed to automate and streamline its marketing processes while increasing the number of marketing campaigns it can plan and execute, raising the level of sophistication of the campaigns, improving analytics and leveraging customer information across the enterprise.
"After a detailed review of the leading CRM vendors, it was clear to us that only Teradata has the knowledge of our business and the comprehensive functionality required to provide the solutions our users are demanding," said Mike Altendorf, vice president of information technology at Ace.
He added: "Teradata CRM will provide us with a detailed understanding of our customer purchase behaviors and preferences, and we will then personalize offers to those customers needs. Plus, the Teradata solution's scalability will enable Ace to support the Helpful Hardware Club's robust growth requirements and demands in the future."
According to Teradata, the new applications will help the company develop more personalized offers to club members and build stronger relationships between Ace retailers and their customers.
"The home improvement industry has become increasingly competitive, both from retailers within our trade channel and with companies from other retail channels offering more and more of our core product lines," commented Mike Bodzewski, Ace Hardware's vice president of marketing, advertising and retail development. "To continue to thrive in this environment, we need superior technology that helps our marketers make better decisions faster and enables the use of customer information across all our business processes, and that's exactly what Teradata and Teradata CRM helps us do. Our senior management team backed the initiative wholeheartedly because they understand the importance of having the right tools to deliver the best information to our retailers to give them a competitive advantage."
