Client story · Partner since 2017The partnership that taught SEAD what CIOaaS should be
Before CIO as a Service was something SEAD offered, Leahy was CIO as a Service.
Leahy IFP is a food and beverage distribution company in Glenview, Illinois — a roughly $125M distributor when the partnership began in 2017, and a company full of ideas about what it would do with better information. Six chapters of those ideas follow.
From SSRS to a Single Portal of Truth
Leahy ran on SSRS reports and hand-built Excel — not for lack of trying. The in-house seat was open; the talent was hard to find. Staff accountants and salespeople assembled the reports themselves, by hand.
So the CIO seat came to sit alongside CTO David Clarine and his team, hand in hand. The first build was the Sales Dashboard, connected to their ERP.
The first board SEAD ever built for Leahy — in daily use since day one.
That dashboard was never replaced. It was layered: pending orders, color-coded because their team asked. Sales versus cases. Then MAPE — margin after product expense, Leahy's own metric — because from a technical perspective a security is closely related to a SKU, as it is to a CPT code, as it is to any item-level information. We learn the business within the business. Nine years of a client's requests are visible in that one screen.
Winning business at the table
At a trade show, a customer asks about their own items. Leahy's answer used to be a follow-up email. It became a tear sheet, generated from the portal on a salesperson's phone, at the table.
Underneath, it is EDI-style code mapping worn as a sales tool: the customer's codes on one side, Leahy's items in the middle, vendor codes on the other. In middle-market food distribution that was ahead of the curve — and part of what opened the Starbucks and Dunkin' door.
Modules on top of the ERP
Co-Wright works as your system of record, or on top of the one you have. At Leahy it does both at once: their ERP stayed the system of record, and the modules grew on top.
- Freight
- Budget
- Order pooling
- EDI
Freight came first as benchmarking: three carriers — optimal, median, and non-optimal — by weight, warehouse, and destination. Then carrier scorecards, reconciled against what the ERP shows was actually paid. Both are used to this day.
The outbound rate calculator — three carriers benchmarked by weight, warehouse, and destination.
Carrier scorecards — reconciled against ERP actuals.
Wall Street to Main Street
Order pooling is a hedge-fund algorithm applied to a routing problem. Days limit, distance limit, weight limit, number of stops, strict-to-region, strict-to-buying-group: configurable rules propose the pool, and one click actions it into the ERP.
The savings are reconciled afterward — in the portal, where they happened.
Order pooling with the savings tracker — proposed, actioned, reconciled.
The budget that runs monthly
Leahy's budget was built September to January, once a year. Then the annual budget met March 2020, and the pitch SEAD had been making became existential. A budget that regenerates monthly moves with the business — a new customer, a market shift, a changed course — instead of anchoring it to last October.
The model trickles up. Weighted averages build by buying group, customer, and category, down to the SKU. Where history is thin, fallback logic climbs back up to corporate growth. What took a team months, once a year, now regenerates monthly.
It is 95% accurate in under a 2-minute run — and the remaining 5% is the point. No computer knows all the context, so overrides arrive as Starbucks, Dunkin', or Monin buy-plan files flowing straight into the budget, or as a phone call a salesperson just took. That split is our whole view on AI.
- A buy-plan file arrives — Starbucks, Dunkin', or Monin — or a salesperson takes a callThe context
- The override lands beside the generated line, and winsReview
- The budget regenerates monthly, overrides carried with it
The budget generator — actual trends beside the current and override budget.
A buy plan compared against the generated budget — the override, visible.
Through every chapter
- 2020The monthly budget proved itselfThe pitch stopped being a pitch. When the market moved weekly, an annual budget was a relic — the monthly regeneration carried Leahy through.
- The acquisitionA natural fit: Finlays acquires Leahy IFPSEAD continues as Leahy's technology partner through the integration — the strongest renewal a partnership gets. The official announcement.
The Sales Dashboard from Chapter one is still open on their screens — now migrating to Co-Wright Intelligence with everything else, still keeping Leahy ahead of their peers.
On cost, one sentence: we don't believe in scopes — we grow with your business, at a price competitive with the salary of a single software developer, with unlimited data, storage, and users, proprietary software, and service included. The comparison, in full.
Bring us the next ambitious idea
Nine years in, Leahy's ideas still pull us forward. That is what a partnership is supposed to do. The preview of your portal is built and shown by engineers, not a sales script.