Retailer automates and centralizes data and reporting to support daily operations and global coordination

Company Overview

Staples, Inc., which was acquired and privatized by Sycamore Partners in 2017, provides office supplies, business services, furniture and technology to consumers and businesses through 1,000+ retail stores, eCommerce and direct sales. In 2019, the company had sales of approximately $9 billion and 75,000 employees. Staples was also ranked 45th on Forbes’ America’s largest Private Companies 2020.

Business Challenge

Senior executives and managers rarely had access to accurate daily reports because manually collecting, managing, distributing and storing critical sales and operational information from various programs and platforms was virtually impossible.

Labor-intensive, time-consuming and costly, the reporting process produced more than 800 distinct documents, with multiple versions of each one. Employees also had to manually locate, analyze, split and convert report content, then email the individual store reports in multiple formats, including Microsoft Word and Excel®.

Solution

Staples chose Redwood Reporting for its superior report management, report distribution, and security features. Staples’ selection process included evaluating five platforms, then narrowing it down to a shortlist of three. The Redwood Reporting platform scored consistently higher than the other solutions.

Results

Approximately 2,000 Staples employees now depend on Redwood Reporting’s financial, HR, operational and other data and reports.

Redwood Reporting ingests data from Staples’ many different tools and platforms and automatically analyzes, splits, converts and bundles data and sections from disparate reports into personalized, unified documents. Those documents are then distributed to employees based on authorizations linked to both job title and seniority.

In addition, Redwood Reporting streamlines approval processes and provides automated, detailed audit trails. And employees now go to a single, consolidated portal to find reports generated in a variety of applications.

Redwood Reporting puts us in control of every version of each report as well as who has access to those reports.” Christine Harrington, Senior IT Manager, Staples

Store and corporate teams can focus on what’s most relevant to their roles and take advantage of Redwood Reporting’s subscription feature to ensure consistent, on-time delivery.

Redwood Reporting’s Burster tool saves an extraordinary amount of time and effort by automatically splitting Staples’ 7,000-page P&L statement into store-specific, three- to four-page reports and sending them to the individual stores.

“Burster is invaluable because it does the separation and distribution for us and as a result, the stores get the reports they need to manage operations a lot faster,” said Harrington.

Redwood Reporting is an efficient, cost-effective way to automatically distribute operational and management reports to stores and corporate headquarters.