Customer Success: W. W. Grainger, Inc.

Overview

W.W. Grainger (Grainger) is a Fortune 500 industrial supply company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. They offer more than 900,000 products for businesses and industrial customers including motors, lighting, safety and material handling supplies. With a huge inventory of varied supply items, Grainger originally relied on a complex, manual process for reconciling and processing credit orders as well as ordering materials for sale.

Challenge

Automate and speed critical business and IT processes

Grainger's catalogue includes more than 900,000 products offered through multiple suppliers across the world. To provide next-day service to their customers, Graingerneeded to process orders within a 24-hour window of time. Originally, their system took 36 hours to complete the 1,200-item, 120-interface process. To keep their business moving on time, Grainger required enterprise-level process automation.

Grainger’s SAP® environment is critical to the business and includes a universe of more than 10 applications. System copy is crucial for backup and to help support IT improvements throughout the company. However, without automation it was a time-consuming hurdle that slowed operations and held back improvements.

Solution

With automation from Redwood, Grainger was able to realize a 20 percent reduction in operating costs overall. Simultaneously, they've significantly sped up their order taking and fulfillment process. Now they easily meet their next day guarantee.

Redwood automation also sped their system copy process, which enabled the company to continue improve processes enterprise-wide. With Redwood, this critical process transformed from 15 people working overtime for 14 days to a process that took 8 people just 5 days to complete, working about 2 hours each day.