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APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
My KeepStock & Value Estimator
The inventory and transaction data related to Grainger’s KeepStock inventory management solutions were retained in a series of third-party edge systems largely disconnected from Grainger’s core architecture. Thus deriving customer reporting and analytics by Sales and Customer Service teams was largely manual, inefficient and time consuming.
In addition, there were no means to demonstrate the value of KeepStock post-implementation, increasing the risk of customer churn and undermining Sales teams’ efforts to organically grow revenues.
Addressing these issues required:
- Creation and maintenance of a reporting data instance;
- Creation of a user-friendly, front-end application accessible by all Grainger employees, most of who had little to no data query experience;
- Creation of a value demonstration tool capable of producing simple, customer-facing deliverables.
I developed a suite of applications, collectively referred to as MyKeepStock, to provide Grainger customer-facing employees with necessary information, reporting and analytics.
MyKS was enabled by Teradata with information extracted from numerous sources, transformed and loaded to create a unified relational KeepStock database. MyKS applications queried against this database via ODBC connection with results downloaded and stored locally. MyKS apps shared common functionality with a standardized navigation bar designed to make exploring, reviewing and sharing information and analytics faster and easier.
The most vital app for sales proved to be the Value Estimator, which quantified the future benefit of KeepStock for a specific Grainger customer based on their current inventory and recent purchase activity. It derived value estimates for nine different measurements and produced PDF and PPT deliverables designed to facilitate conversations with customers and help demonstrate the value of KeepStock.
Upon its distribution to Grainger laptops MyKS was utilized each year by more than 2,000 employees across Sales and Customer Service teams. In addition, the unified database built and maintained within Teradata was accessed and utilized by Finance, Operations and Product Management teams for in-depth customer behavior and profitability analysis.
Sellers who adopted use of the Value Estimator to present value demonstration deliverables to their customers had an annual revenue retention rate 24% higher than non-adopting sellers.
MyKS reporting and analytics were eventually transitioned to SAP Business Objects WEBI reporting and the program was fully decommissioned seven years after its launch.
