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Strategy

Grainger’s High-Touch Advantage: How the MRO Leader Turned Customer Problems into a Growth Engine

Grainger’s largest business is no longer just about supplying MRO products. Its High-Touch model is built around helping customers reduce procurement friction, inventory waste, labor strain and operational complexity. We explore that business unit in the first of a three-part deep dive series into the company that has long dominated MDM's Top Distributors Lists.

June 11, 2026

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Editor's Note: This is the first in a three-part series that will later be packaged into MDM's next Case Study report. Click on images for hi-res version.

Grainger’s High-Touch Solutions business is best understood as an answer to a problem every industrial distributor knows well: MRO is essential, but it is rarely clean.

The products themselves matter, of course. Customers need safety, facility maintenance, material handling, janitorial, metalworking, plumbing, hand tool and countless other MRO items available when work must get done. But the bigger challenge for many customers is not the…

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