News

Posted On: 12/05/2007

Grainger rolls in to Windy City

PlantServices.com

By Michael Ermitage

Distributor expands with bricks, mortar, bytes and SKUs

The Chicago-area portion of Grainger’s market expansion initiative arrived a few weeks before the city’s first snowfall. We checked one of the new locations.

With the construction and grand opening of the Bensenville, Ill., warehouse and store front, Grainger offers 23,000 SKUs to customers in the northwest suburbs.

“We’re expecting to get a lot of customers,” said Branch Manager Eric Nelsen. “With the added SKUs, customers no longer have to make the longer drive to the larger warehouses.”

One of the primary goals of the five-year long market initiative is to make more product available at more locations.  And, if a warehouse doesn’t have a particular product, it has the capability to make a same-day order so the item will be available later in the same business day.

“We meet the customers’ needs,” Nelsen added. “If we don’t have what they’re looking for in the morning, we’ll have it in the afternoon.”

The 27,000-square-foot warehouse hosted an open house with 25 vendors attending (including 3M, Westward, CRC, Fluke, Hubbell, Milwaukee, Dayton and Stanley). Former Chicago Bear Keith van Horne was available for autographs.
 
In addition to establishing a larger brick-and-mortar presence, Grainger is exploring improvements on the Web. The company maintains a Web portal designed specifically for plant managers at www.grainger.com/plant. The Website offers easily downloadable PDFs such as a Plant Shutdown Checklist, and scheduled Webinars on plant maintenance.

Coinciding with the market initiative, a product expansion initiative has already added 23,000 SKUs to Grainger’s catalog. And the modernization and expansion of warehouses throughout the company’s 25 major markets isn’t a one-and-done project.

“We will always continue to reevaluate,” said Kelly France, Grainger regional communications specialist. “We will change as our customers change.”