Griffin RESA

Griffin Regional Educational Service Agency (RESA) is one of 16 intermediate agencies in Georgia, each serving a designated region of school districts.

PROJECT DETAILS

Client:

Griffin RESA

Category:
BigCommerce
Griffin RESA Provides Essential School Supplies to School Districts Through Newly Launched BigCommerce B2B Site

Griffin RESA is a non-profit organization that has served south metro country school systems since 1966, providing school materials and equipment for its region’s school systems. Supplying its schools with essential materials including office supplies, stationary, art and audio/visual equipment, and personal protective equipment (PPE), Griffin RESA strives to enhance school safety and reliably provide supplies to the schools it serves. As the pandemic continues its impact across the school systems in the region, Griffin RESA remains committed to supporting education and its schools with the school supplies, protective equipment, and safety materials needed to provide a safe learning experience.

Looking for a solution that would meet its unique requirements and adapt to its school system workflow, Griffin RESA needed to move away from its outdated ERP system as it could no longer support its growing business needs. The organization wanted a solution that could provide user role hierarchy to support its purchasing approval processes in addition to its address book management and shopping list requirements. Discovering eCommerce platform BigCommerce, Griffin RESA found its personalized business needs could be fulfilled with the advanced B2B functionality offered by the platform together with BundleB2B.

User Management

Establish multiple tiers of school buyers who have specific roles, permissions, and purchasing capabilities within their school district.

Shopping List

Create and save multiple shopping lists for purchasing approval with email notifications to track progress and the ability to add comments.

Address Book

Manage the school billing and shipping addresses through the company address book and control user access and configuration options.

Our Solution

A major pain point Griffin RESA wanted to solve was being able to effectively manage its shopping list approval workflow across its school districts. Based on school type, shopping lists would need to be processed by either a school approver directly or go through a district approver for approval first. Leveraging BundleB2B’s corporate account management capabilities to establish these different user roles and permissions, Griffin RESA could now easily handle this workflow online. Establishing teachers as junior buyers, district approvers as sales reps, and the school approver for each school as the company admin within BundleB2B, each member of the organization could now be properly assigned with the right access and permissions when ordering school supplies.

Additional shopping list fields were added to support Griffin RESA’s school district and county level workflow requirements. For instance, once teachers submitted their shopping lists for approval, the district or school approver had to associate the shopping list type to either “School Pay” or “County Pay” and be able to add comments about the list when needed. Any comments would then be sent back to the teacher through an automated email. Once approved, district and school approvers could make changes to the shopping list including changing quantities and adding more items to the list before completing the order.

For Griffin RESA to support its largest school district in the school system, it had further requirements that needed to be handled. The BundleB2B team helped Griffin RESA establish shopping list naming conventions to accommodate that district’s accounting workflow as well as set minimum order amounts and email notification workflows when shopping lists are ready for review. Making sure the correct accounting department would be set up for the billing address and the correct school would receive their requested supplies through the right shipping address was also important for Griffin RESA to carefully manage through BundleB2B’s address book management capabilities.

With Griffin RESA’s personalized requirements fully supported by the advanced B2B functionality offered by BigCommerce and BundleB2B, the organization now has a streamlined process to support its nearly 300 different schools across the region who need to order school supplies for their classrooms. Since launching the new site, all the schools Griffin RESA services can now reliably order their school equipment through the organization’s BigCommerce B2B store and quickly facilitate its purchases online.

We had a last-minute requirement from our largest customer, and BundleB2B quickly brainstormed and figured out how to re-design our system to accommodate our customer. The entire team is very responsive and supportive, and they will definitely figure out how to solve any needs of your business.

Griffin RESA

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