Business Analyst

at  Grainger

Work Location Type: Hybrid
As a leading industrial distributor with operations primarily in North America, Japan and the United Kingdom, We Keep The World Working® by serving more than 4.5 million customers worldwide with products delivered through innovative technology and deep customer relationships. With 2023 sales of $16.5 billion, we’re dedicated to providing value for customers, fostering an engaging culture for team members and driving strong financial results.
Our welcoming workplace enables you to learn, grow and make a difference by keeping businesses running and their people safe. We’re looking for passionate people to join our team as we continue leading the industry over our next 100 years.
Primary Function
The Strategic Initiative team is responsible for analytics, process improvement, and overall management of new project initiatives, stakeholders, key metrics, and tools used to make business decisions in Financial Services and Treasury (FS&T). The primary role of this team is to identify and execute operational solutions that serve critical business and advocate for change needs for FS&T.
The primary role of this position is to support the design and strategy for operational solutions and process improvement. Responsible for providing insights and business intelligence around FS&T. In collaboration with the Sr. Business Analyst in designing and delivering solutions that translate operating metrics into critical insights that inform strategies, business decisions and recommendations. Considered the Subject-matter-expert to establish, communicate and execute a clear operational strategy for the business, ensuring it evolves over time to reflect the changing needs of the business, FS&T stakeholders, and the FACS organization.

Main Duties and Responsibilities

• Function as a liaison working with stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate, and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems.
• Provide value added analysis, insights and recommendations that helps leaders establish priorities and set direction, aligning with overall company and department objectives.
• Understand business problems and opportunities in the context of the requirements, recommends, and implements solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
• System Development – Analysis work performed to review the current stated solutions used by an organization, to identify the issues, define the requirements, and suggest best possible solutions (i.e., Snowflake, Tableau Alteryx).
• Ability to use A3 Thinking to identify the tasks, knowledge, and techniques required to determine and assess proposed solutions to business problems.
• Continuous Improvement – Analysis work to review current manual or workflow activities and tasks performed by people, functional areas, and systems, which are designed to achieve a specific outcome, while assuring data quality/integrity. Understands relationships, information exchanges/handoffs, procedures, policies, and observations of work performed to achieve specific outcomes.
• Quickly build relationships and partner with management to provide solutions that will drive strategy and organizational vision to all functional areas in the business.
• Provide recommendations and support discussions with leadership to understand business gaps in order to provide analytical solutions and implementation plans that includes a systemic component to reduce time spent on data mining or validating the integrity of data.
• Document procedures and processes appropriately to build a library of solutions that future business units can leverage.
• Make improvements by automating, refining, and implementing tools, and deliverables both within Finance and supporting departments.

Education and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree required
• Minimum of 2 years working with product information management systems (e.g. STEP)
• Minimum of 2 years working with querying data warehouse systems (e.g. SQL/Snowflake)
• Minimum of 2 years with PowerBI and other reporting tools and technologies
• Broad business knowledge and organizational awareness as well as an understanding of business operational drivers.
• Proven analytic and quantitative decision-making skills.
• Excellent verbal, written communication, and organizational skills and the ability to interface effectively with senior team members.
• The ability to influence decision-making processes without having specific authority.

This role requires providing guidance in operational matters and the need to communicate with all levels in the organization. A strong work ethic and results orientation is required to succeed in a fast paced, customer focused environment. Strong team skills are required in order to be effective in integrating solutions to support the business going forward.
Grainger is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status

• Function as a liaison working with stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate, and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems.
• Provide value added analysis, insights and recommendations that helps leaders establish priorities and set direction, aligning with overall company and department objectives.
• Understand business problems and opportunities in the context of the requirements, recommends, and implements solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
• System Development – Analysis work performed to review the current stated solutions used by an organization, to identify the issues, define the requirements, and suggest best possible solutions (i.e., Snowflake, Tableau Alteryx).
• Ability to use A3 Thinking to identify the tasks, knowledge, and techniques required to determine and assess proposed solutions to business problems.
• Continuous Improvement – Analysis work to review current manual or workflow activities and tasks performed by people, functional areas, and systems, which are designed to achieve a specific outcome, while assuring data quality/integrity. Understands relationships, information exchanges/handoffs, procedures, policies, and observations of work performed to achieve specific outcomes.
• Quickly build relationships and partner with management to provide solutions that will drive strategy and organizational vision to all functional areas in the business.
• Provide recommendations and support discussions with leadership to understand business gaps in order to provide analytical solutions and implementation plans that includes a systemic component to reduce time spent on data mining or validating the integrity of data.
• Document procedures and processes appropriately to build a library of solutions that future business units can leverage.
• Make improvements by automating, refining, and implementing tools, and deliverables both within Finance and supporting departments