Who is Grizzly Industrial?

Grizzly Industrial is a major supplier of high-quality woodworking and metalworking machinery, power tools, and shop equipment. Founded in 1983 in Bellingham, WA, the company offers a wide range of affordable, high-quality products including table saws, lathes, bandsaws, and drill presses serving customers from hobbyists to large enterprises like Goodyear, General Electric, Frito-Lay, and Gibson Musical Instruments. 

Eli Godbolt has been with the company since 2019. Previously a systems administrator, Grizzly’s IT Operations Manager says he tries to provide exceptional service while keeping himself in the background as much as possible – a little bit like a good defenseman.

“My best day is when things just work, and people don’t even know that I’m doing what I’m doing,” he says with a laugh.

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The Challenge: Securely and efficiently moving sensitive CAD files to overseas manufacturers

Grizzly works with several overseas manufacturing partners, moving sensitive IP like CAD drawings between factories in Asia and the company’s head office. At the same time, its marketing team often exchanges media with vendors to help promote the company’s products. 

But the company’s previous method of transferring files by providing internal SharePoint access to vendors was clunky, time-consuming, and prone to error. 

• Difficulty onboarding outside vendors: “It would take a while to get vendors set up, because you'd be going back and forth with time differences, language barriers, all that kind of stuff.”
• A lack of integrated workflows: “We need something that integrates with all the tools we use. We're a Microsoft-first shop, and we have to have something that is loggable that I can keep track of on my end.” 
• Security concerns: “Some of our CAD files are machines that are in development. So we needed files to be able to expire after a certain amount of time. We needed SOC 2 compliance, and we needed single sign-on (SSO).”
• A lack of automation: “We just needed a way to say ‘Here’s our MASV Portal – just drop a file in there’ and have the file end up where we need it.”

The Solution: Easy Onboarding, No-Code Integrations, and Simple Automation

Godbolt ruled out the possibility of consumer-grade transfer tools like Dropbox and WeTransfer right away – they’re not secure enough and don’t have the capacity to handle enterprise-grade data volumes, he says.

“We were looking for something very specific,” he adds, “and there wasn't a ton out there that really fit the bill. Then we found MASV.”

Portals

It’s no exaggeration to say that browser-based MASV Portals have revolutionized Grizzly’s file-sharing workflows, which were plagued by time-consuming setup issues for external collaborators.

“It needs to be a quick thing – I don't want to have to set up a vendor with guest access when we might not even see them again after a few months. But getting users onboarded was easy. They had it set up and were using it within an hour or two.”

MASV Portals are free and unlimited to spin up, can be used on any device and any web browser, and allow collaborators to drag-and-drop files for upload without having to install software or even needing to log in to MASV.

Oh, and they can also be configured to automatically send content to specific destinations, like Microsoft storage. 

Integrations

Because Grizzly uses Microsoft products like OneDrive and SharePoint, its enterprise transfer solution absolutely had to integrate with these tools to ensure a seamless workflow – and MASV passed that test with flying colors. 

“Integrating MASV into our tech stack was really easy,” Godbolt says. “I did it in less than a day.” 

MASV is also now integrated with Grizzly’s Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure ID) for SSO authentication.

Security

Speaking of SSO, Goldbolt says the security and compliance of its transfer solution has to be rock solid to protect Grizzly’s sensitive IP from unauthorized access. 

“We needed a tool that would fit in with our security stack,” he says. “Knowing that MASV is a security-first platform made me feel pretty confident about the decision.”

Several security features made MASV an especially strong fit:

• An enterprise-grade compliance posture, including SOC 2 Type II
• Password-protected transfers, download limits, and file expiry dates
• The MASV Dashboard to easily track transfer activity in real-time
• SSO to give the team visibility in Azure to quickly flag suspicious logins

“We don't just want anybody to be able to get a link and go in there to download a file," adds Godbolt.

Automation

Instead of manually downloading and re-uploading files to storage, MASV Portals now automatically upload content to specific folders in OneDrive and SharePoint using Watch Folders (via the Desktop App) and Custom Metadata Forms that help route files to specific destinations.

Godbolt says adding automation to its file transfer and ingestion process has saved countless hours and eliminated potential confusion and lost files. 

“We have a couple Portals with dropdown menus vendors can use to identify themselves,” he explains, “so their files just get dropped into the right folder on SharePoint. That’s great for keeping stuff organized – and we don’t have to manually do anything.”

MASV automation has been so effective that Godbolt says he has now set up the MASV Desktop App for Grizzy’s marketing team to share collateral with retail vendors. 

“It’s one of those things where they don't even have to think about it – they just drop stuff in the Portal, MASV sees it, and automatically sends it over. It has really helped out that workflow for them.”

The Result: Efficient, secure transfers and 50%+ return on investment

Godbolt says MASV's simple onboarding helps him save up to five hours per month by not having to explain complex processes or field support calls. That’s a significant enough savings that it accounts for around half of Grizzly’s costs over the course of a year – or more than a 50% return on investment for the company, without counting other efficiencies MASV has helped it achieve.

“I can deploy MASV to people really easily, and it doesn’t take much time. So the ROI on that is pretty huge.” 

The efficiency of MASV has even opened up other use cases Grizzly hadn’t thought of previously, such as more easily sharing security camera video footage with law enforcement upon request. 

“MASV has shown us there are a lot of use cases that we didn’t know we could actually do super easy now, without having to open files in a video editor and compress them. It just really streamlines everything.”