How Mayer Electric amplified its business with modern BI

Scott Wagner can pinpoint the beginning of the modern data revolution at Mayer Electric. It was when he got a call from the company’s president after word got out that he was solving some problems with data.

“He wanted to know if I could automate a report for him,” Scott, Mayer’s director of BI strategy, remembers. “It was an executive summary he used in board meetings but always needed to update manually.

“I went to work on that and he liked the end result. So, I said, ‘You know, maybe we should look at a long-term solution instead of doing everything in (Microsoft) Excel.’ The rest is history.”

Fast forward almost six years and Mayer Electric is anything but an organization reliant on spreadsheet software. It’s a prime example of how you can amp up your business by plugging into something much more powerful: modern BI for all.

“We’re still one of the nation’s largest wholesale distributors of electrical supplies and equipment,” Scott said, “but now we excel at responding to disruption and uncovering new business value. We’re stronger in every area that matters.”

To ignite Mayer’s digital transformation, Scott zeroed in on the three pillars of modern BI for all: data agility, data literacy, and intelligent action.

“If you have data agility, then you understand your environment and know what needs to happen next,” Scott said. “That’s a position we wanted to be in. But it took a lot of up-front thought. We had to think about how the data was going to be consumed, how we wanted to filter things, how we should structure the information, how much flexibility should be built in (to the new system), what the governance aspect should look like, and what would help us build trust within the entire organization.”

To work through that critical process, Scott and his team enlisted the help of Domo technicians and Dojo, an online forum where Domo users go to share questions and answers around how to best leverage the platform. And they made two separate trips to Domo headquarters in Utah to learn how Domo uses Domo.

“Every single one of those interactions yielded something beneficial and helped us see what was possible,” Scott said.

To bolster data literacy across the business, Scott looked for others within Mayer who were curious about data and made them “Domo Masters”—super users empowered to build the kind of data-driven tools that those within their particular departments would feel comfortable engaging with.

“Our Domo Masters just make it all so simple,” Scott said. “In a lot of cases, you just add a filter, and boom!—the page you need for your meeting is ready. And because it’s so easy, people are more apt to explore data, find answers on their own, and build a level of confidence that is crucial to developing a data-driven culture.”

Finally, to make intelligent action a part of Mayer’s business fabric, Scott focused on the company’s ticket writers—a role he used to have a hand in filling—and let the 80/20 rule (aka the Pareto principle) dictate the starting point.

“Eighty percent of the problems our ticket writers might encounter come from 20% or less of the orders that they enter,” Scott said. “So, the tools or cards we have in Domo are focused on addressing those vital few potential issues.

“Now, our ticket writers can work more proactively, which translates to improved customer service and lower stress because they’re dealing with problems before the phone even rings.”

Scott was the featured guest of a November 2021 Domo-sponsored webinar titled, “Delivering Modern BI for All: How to Lead a Data-Driven Revolution. Watch the event on-demand to learn more from him, including how such a transformation can benefit your business partners and what the next frontier of modern BI may very well be.