Helping Wabash Illuminate their Data Story

Helping Wabash illuminate their data story

September 3, 2025
By Bryce Burgess | Director of Solutions Operations

We’ve heard it a million times: Data is king. But what I’ve learned in my role is that data is … just data. It’s only valuable to the extent that it sparks insights and drives action. Don’t get me wrong – data can be king, but only if we understand the data story.

As a strategic supply chain partner, part of our job is to help the decision-makers in your business “get the story” without wrestling with spreadsheets and pivot tables. They shouldn’t have to be data analysts to understand what’s going on.

Creating those simple tools isn’t simple. Fortunately, we’ve been challenged to innovate by great customers like Wabash. As many of you know, Wabash is a world-class manufacturer of truck trailers and other engineered solutions for the transportation, logistics, and infrastructure markets. Here’s how we worked together to illuminate their data story.

A great start, then some growing pains

In 2021, the partnership kicked off with a big win: Our safety specialists led a rationalization project that significantly reduced safety glove SKUs. One of the biggest impacts was converting a variety of cut level gloves into just one or two options from our Body Guard® brand. The project – along with consumption controls through our vending solutions – helped Wabash reduce their key performance indicator for PPE, “dollars per person,” by roughly 25%. Those hard cost savings contributed to Fastenal being named one of Wabash’s Platinum Suppliers (a group of 50 top performers) in our first year of the partnership.

Speaking of vending, we had deployed around 150 devices throughout their 12 plants. Their production teams loved it. Point-of-use access to parts and tools meant more time to focus on their #1 KPI: getting trailers and other deliverables out the door.

But point-of-use access is just part of the vending value proposition. We began to get some pushback from the finance team about a rise in consumption and overall spending tied to operations supplies. (This was reflected in Wabash’s “cost per unit” KPI.)

There were underlying reasons for this – production was booming, and they were relying on us for a far greater breadth and volume of product vs. the incumbent supplier. Nonetheless, the message was clear: We simply cannot add more machines unless you show us that vending is working.

They didn’t need more data. We were already providing mounds of it with the weekly vending reports we customized for each plant (which, on a personal note, was taking about 75% of my time). But the reports weren’t breaking through. In the midst of a record sales year, the plant managers were laser-focused on production. They didn’t have time to sift through spreadsheets to tease out patterns and anomalies. Again, they didn’t need data – they needed tools to understand their data story.

We had to come up with a better solution, so I reached out to our Power BI team with a challenge: create a dashboard that lets Wabash’s production leaders identify trends and outliers in five minutes instead of two hours. This was no small ask – it took months of brainstorming and development. But eventually we created a prototype, workshopped it with a group of plant managers (who, by the way, wanted it to work as much as we did), and dialed in on a set of filters and visualization tools to meet their needs.

Instead of poring over spreadsheets in search of clues, we now meet for a half hour each week to talk about the key insights illustrated in the reports: the fastest turning SKUs, the top users, the red flags, and the low-hanging opportunities.

This was the key that unlocked the potential of their vending solution.

When a drill becomes a canary in the coalmine

During one of our meetings, we had a revelation with a plant manager: Hey, there’s a huge spike in usage of this particular drill bit, used by this particular employee, for this particular drill press. It was a special part with a 10-week lead time. They were churning through them so quickly that we were facing a potential stockout two months down the road, which would have halted production.

Why on earth was this happening? It wasn’t a user error or faulty part. It turned out that the head of the drill press was loose and the bits were snapping in half. With a simple repair, they fixed the problem and avoided an emergency.

That drill bit had a story to tell.

Previously, the story may have gone unnoticed, just another number on a spreadsheet. But with the new visualization tools, it jumped off the screen.

A resounding reduction in earplug spend

We’ve enjoyed amazing teamwork with our safety specialists – they focus on safety support; we focus on the data. Following the glove SKU rationalization project, we continued working through other PPE categories, including hearing protection. This sparked another “a-ha moment” courtesy of the BI dashboard. It revealed that one plant was spending way more on earplugs than the others, and that one particular SKU was driving the bulk of the discrepancy.

We put on our detective hats and made two discoveries: (1) The product was being dispensed by the case; and (2), although the earplugs are reusable, employees were treating them as throw-aways. So, we changed the package quantity, made disposable earplugs more readily available, and saw a significant drop in spend at that location. All because we heard the story those earplugs were telling – a story made loud and clear by the BI dashboard.

As engagement went up, costs went down

Let’s back up a bit. Before we could start stacking these kinds of wins, we needed to get buy-in from the people whose decisions drive P&L within Wabash. So, we sat down with each of the plant managers and their operations leads to train them on the dashboard and get them comfortable using it as part of their weekly routine. From there, it spread organically. As their engagement grew, they shared it with others, who saw the value and shared it with even more people. Fastenal generates thousands of different reports to meet all kinds of customer needs. In short order, the Wabash dashboard became one of the top five most viewed reports in the entire company.

With that, the needle began to move … in two directions. As usage of the BI dashboard went up – as more and more P&L influencers used it to make decisions within their slice of the business – Wabash’s consumption and spend moved down. Their understanding of the data story empowered them to adapt and improve with a new level of agility.

Make no mistake: This is Wabash’s success story, not ours. But there’s a sidebar to the story that we’re extremely proud of: Earlier this year, Fastenal was named Wabash’s Pinnacle Supplier – the first time in their company’s history that an industrial and safety supplier received the top honor.

A blueprint for the new vending insights report on FAST360

This is a great example of a specific customer challenge driving global innovation. We’ve adapted the same core BI framework to create the new “Vending Insights” dashboard within our FAST360º customer portal, available to all organizations that have a contract with Fastenal. It’s part of a major initiative to provide an all-encompassing view of our digital relationship, including analytics tools to help you understand spend, usage, and cost savings across your facilities. Stay tuned for more insights and innovations as we continue this evolution.

In the meantime, I encourage you to work with your Fastenal team to illuminate the hidden cost drivers in your supply chain.

We’re ready to help you turn raw data into an actionable data story.