Tractor Supply Company Unlocks Visibility and Real-Time Portfolio Data to Drive Organizational Transformation

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Tractor Supply Company saw exponential growth in a short amount of time. As such, they needed a portfolio management solution that could support them along their maturity journey.

Tractor Supply Company was using spreadsheets to plan and manage projects, creating unnecessary manual work and making trackability a challenge. They had also recently acquired Petsense, a pet supply store, and needed processes and solutions that made their enterprise scalable for growth.

Tractor Supply Company had already been using Planview for timekeeping, but they quickly realized they could unlock much more from Planview as a partner.

The PMO team conducted stakeholder interviews to uncover pain points that undermined their efficiency and scalability. After analyzing gaps and prioritizing a list of immediate and feasible updates, Tractor Supply Company turned to Planview’s PPM solution to help achieve organizational transformation.

“I think one of the things that we’ve really seen is the credibility of the PMO. I had to learn to start showing data, and Planview is how I show it,” said Marea Herrington, Director of Planning/ Governance, Technology Administration at Tractor Supply Company.

Since 1938, Tractor Supply Company has served recreational farmers, ranchers, homeowners, gardeners, and pet enthusiasts. They sell a wide range of products, including clothing, tractor and trailer parts and accessories, equine and pet supplies, lawn and garden accessories, power tools, and riding mowers.

Tractor Supply Company is also one of Fortune 500’s fastest-rising companies and is currently ranked 291 on that list.

Tractor Supply Company used offline spreadsheets and documents to manage work, resulting in little visibility or trackability for all their projects. Without centralized processes and a single source of truth, getting insights into the health and performance of projects required significant manual effort.

“One of the realizations for me was that we were not scalable,” said Herrington. “It really highlighted how decentralized our processes were.”

Getting accurate financial data proved to be a significant challenge. Data was typically stored offline, which significantly inhibited the company’s decision-making, productivity, and efficiency. “If someone needed to know how much money they had on a project, or how much money a portfolio still has, it would sometimes take days to get that information,” Herrington noted.

Tractor Supply Company also needed a solution that centralized all their projects and associated information.

“We did not have a single project repository,” said Herrington. “We had no aggregated reporting. I did not have one place where I could go and say, ‘I want to know everything about where this new project is contained – what it’s doing, who’s working on it, how much money, and when it got approvals.’ I had to search ten different places to find that.”

Tractor Supply Company saw an urgent need to improve their processes and tools to be more proactive and scalable for growth. At the time, the organization could only plan and estimate up to 20 days in the future.

“These challenges created the perfect storm for Petsense and the growth that would come with COVID,” said Herrington. “If we had maintained this environment, I don’t know how we would’ve survived COVID.”

To put themselves in the best position for growth, change, and future acquisitions, Tractor Supply Company knew they needed a solution to give them more visibility into staffing and resources. They also recognized a need to replace their waterfall project management style with a more agile and adaptive process that facilitated faster delivery cycles on important projects and initiatives.

Herrington asked key decision makers in IT, corporate finance, and procurement what pain point they would wipe out if they could wave a magic wand. Their answers were illuminating.

First was financial data. Teams wanted to know how much money they had and didn’t have. They also wanted a central repository acting as their single source of truth, as well as accurate and up-to-date reporting.

With centralized, accurate data, Herrington and her team could work faster and make better-informed decisions. “All of a sudden, I could centralize data, I could make it simple or narrow it down. I could collect data that our teams wanted, and I could present it in a way that made it easy for the project managers to upgrade.”

Tractor Supply Company used Planview’s PPM solution to address the enterprise’s top pain points. They used Planview to create a central hub for their projects and unlock visibility into the performance, status, and financial health of their projects and portfolios.

“I was in a meeting with a VP just two weeks ago, and he said, ‘I need to know this about projects, and I know it’ll take a week to get it,’” said Herrington. “I said, ‘Let me stop you. It’ll take me two minutes. Do you want it now, or do you want it Friday morning so you can digest it?’ It was such a win,” noted Herrington. “And it was a win because we had been doing all this work.”

Tractor Supply Company used Planview’s PPM solution to increase visibility, make project information more accessible, and leverage real-time financial data with the click of a button.

Herrington now sends a financial report once a week, instead of once a month like she did in the past. Since the reports are now in real-time, business leaders can confidently make decisions without worrying about using inaccurate and outdated data.

“I can tell a director within a matter of minutes how much money they have, what their budget is, where they’re trending, and where they’re tracking,” said Herrington. “I can tell them the indicators that tell whether they’re in trouble, they’re headed to trouble, or whether they underspent and could get money back.”

Tractor Supply Company also used Planview’s PPM solution to create leading and lagging indicators. That way, they can use leading indicators to become more proactive in identifying problems before they happen. Lagging indicators have helped them identify immediate problems, so they can address those issues immediately instead of months later.

“Thanks to Planview, we know more about our work than we’ve ever known,” said Herrington. “And the more we know, the more people want to know. We pull in so much more data now.”

Now that they’ve accomplished their initial goals, Tractor Supply Company plans to mature their operations with Planview. With the help of their enterprise architecture team, Tractor Supply Company intends to integrate Planview’s PPM solution with other tools used by departments across their organization.

“How do I begin to integrate my corporate offices, finance team, and procurement team?”, asked Herrington. “Maybe it’s not technical like an API integration. But I want them to use our tools instead of an Excel spreadsheet. That’s all coming in phase two.”