Grainger bulks up for lean customers

Expansions at the facilities maintenance distributor will allow the company to go from next-day to same-day in Northern New Jersey.

By Tom Andel, Editor in chief -- Modern Materials Handling, 8/2/2007

W.W. Grainger, a leading business-to-business distributor of facilities maintenance supplies in North America, announced plans to expand its inventory and operations in Northern New Jersey. The company is adding two new locations, expanding several existing locations, and relocating several others.

While many of Grainger’s customers are going lean with their inventories, Grainger sees value in upping theirs—and adding square footage to do so. Its total square footage in North Jersey will expand by 33%, and it will boost its locally tailored inventory by 14%. This expansion will enable Grainger to go from next-day to same-day availability.

“This year we began a process where through our supply chain and our DCs in New Jersey we’re able to move product into those local branches twice during the day,” says Dave Midgley, district branch services manager for New Jersey. “We serve over a million customers and process hundreds of thousands of orders per day.”

These practices came in handy at the end of April this year when the area suffered severe rains and flooding. Grainger moved pumps, rain supplies, and other equipment every two hours.

Midgley says Grainger’s strategy is to help customers with contingency planning while enabling them to stay as lean as possible.

“Our message is: Rely on our inventory,” he says. “This market expansion in Northern New Jersey is something we’re doing across the country. We’re marching through the top 25 metropolitan markets across the country and boosting our presence. We’ve also boosted the number of products in our entire system by 20% in the last two years.”

At the same time, Grainger is upgrading materials handling practices across its 18 national DCs, which serve 600 branches.

Practice upgrades include:

• Incorporating the automated material handling necessary to move product within those million square foot facilities
• Employees are now picking to conveyors instead of walking long distances between picks.
• To ensure balanced inventories, Grainger examines inventories on a regular basis looking for slow moving items. If an item hasn’t sold well in the last 12 months it is redeployed to another DC.