HD Supply Sees Heavy Duty Returns From Asset Protection Automation

About the Company

HD Supply is one of the largest industrial distributors in North America. The company provides a broad range of more than 800,000 products and value-add services to approximately 500,000 customers in the maintenance, repair, operations and residential / non-residential construction sectors. With more than 80 years’ experience in the industry, HD Supply has grown to more than 260 locations in 36 states and has 11,000 employees.

The History

After using the same case and incident management tool for over 10 years, the HD Supply Asset Protection team recognized the need to seek out a replacement to meet their changing and growing needs. According to their wish list, the new solution would have to be one that could be customized quickly and easily, wouldn’t require constant upgrades and would offer fast, efficient reporting. On the recommendation of a colleague, Patrick Moore, Manager of Asset Protection, called on ThinkLP who, he quickly learned, could provide the automation and efficiencies his team was seeking.

Fast, Cost-Effective Solution

Before ThinkLP, the HD Supply team had become accustomed to having to wait months for delivery of costly software projects. Today, it’s an entirely different scenario. What used to take months, can happen in minutes when they put ThinkLPs comprehensive configuration tools to work. ThinkLP tools allow the team to be self-sufficient. They can configure new fields, create dashboards/reports, generate incident/case forms and build new notification templates themselves, without having to wait.

Reporting Improves Productivity by 50%

The HD Supply team no longer loses valuable time generating reports manually. By leveraging ThinkLP’s comprehensive reporting and dashboarding capabilities, they are able to automate reports that used to be manual, saving several days of time each month.

Patrick saw a huge gain immediately and remarked, “I have increased my productivity by at least 50%. Previously, we had to spend hours and hours and hours and hours to generate reports, now we generate reports in ThinkLP instantly.”

Managing Vendors and AP Projects

While Patrick knew firsthand that managing the installation of CCTV, alarm and keyless entry systems for a large organization was once a logistical nightmare, he soon learned that working with ThinkLP was a dream. Early in the rollout of ThinkLP, he saw that he could implement new features himself which would enable him to easily manage and track multiple vendors, installers and integrators. He could create new fields, construct forms, set up notifications, and build reports and dashboards. In the past, vendors and integrators would miss important notifications resulting in projects being delivered late. By creating and sending out an aging report of projects backed up by periodic auto-reminders, vendors and integrators are now held to account. Before ThinkLP, the AP team spent much of the week tracking down the status of each job and they had to manually generate executive status reports. Now in their ThinkLP world, everything is easier; status reports are generated and sent automatically, project details can be accessed at any time and projects are delivered on time.

Taking Charge of a Situation

With ThinkLP, HD Supply was able to mitigate a serious and potentially costly issue quickly. At the distribution center in Houston, 79 semi-truck batteries were stolen recently. This meant a $40,000 loss, and with no shipments permitted to come in or go out, it effectively shut down the DC which would translate into further loss. Through ThinkLP, an incident report was submitted immediately and notifications were sent to Asset Protection, Facility Management and the executive team. Within just ten minutes of the initial report, the Asset Protection team was reviewing CCTV, the Facilities team had contacted repair teams to install new batteries and the executives were updated. The DC was back up and running in record time.

FM Dashboard Enables Refresh Program

The Facility Maintenance department of HD Supply, which oversees 55 DCs, asked Patrick to draft a CCTV refresh schedule. Leveraging ThinkLP’s reporting tools, Patrick was able to create a report which included all of the relevant information including CCTV system details, repair history, location crime risk and the number of after-hours theft incidents resulting from burglary. He estimates that with the previous system, his report would have taken weeks to create. With ThinkLP, he had the full report in less than 45 minutes. Armed with the right data, HD Supply was able to prioritize a full two-year refresh schedule.

Eliminating Duplicate Expenses

Expense reports are a regular part of doing business and mistakes can happen, but so can fraud. With 11,000 employees, it’s a daunting task to identify and follow up on potential mistakes and fraud. By automating this process ThinkLP helps HD Supply identify mistakes and/or fraud enabling the Asset Protection team to efficiently track down the duplicate expenses and take appropriate action.

Stolen Device Reporting

Managing stolen laptops, tablets and mobile phones is not new for HD Supply, but now, at least, it’s made easier with automated reports. Before ThinkLP, the Asset Protection team would have to go through a number of time-consuming tasks, including manually extracting data from their legacy tool, importing it into Excel, generating charts, transferring it to PowerPoint and then sending results to stakeholders. Now, ThinkLP’s report generation and notification system offers fully automated reports eliminating these cumbersome steps and saving time.

Cash Variance Reporting

HD Supply’s chain of home improvement stores used to have to send cash variance reports by paper fax, key them into Excel and then eventually generate reports. Now, Store Managers simply enter the reports into ThinkLP and automated processes inform stakeholders and distribute reports without intervention.

Investing in Innovation

HD Supply sees the benefits of asset protection automation and concedes that they have only just scratched the surface. They are committed to continued innovation through new initiatives because they realize the benefits immediately. Patrick Moore, Manager of Asset Protection is quick to point out what has made the difference for him and his team:

ThinkLP is the holy grail of Asset Protection Data Management

ThinkLP is the only thing that I’ve ever used that has brought everything that I ever needed or wanted into one place and made it accessible and shareable to who needs it. Time creating reports with ThinkLP is minuscule to the time it would take to pulling data together manually.”

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