Is “e” (needs for eCommerce, data, mobility, CRM, etc) increasing for you and complicating your business?

The next following comments were sent to us by a distributor who requested that they remain nameless but who authorized us to share their input in the interest of “helping the industry move forward”. This input is verbatim with the question and their input:

Is your company thinking more about “e” and integrating it into all aspects of your business?

Input: Been doing this to some extent for at least 10 years, actively for the last 4-5 years, and even more so the last 2.

How is this changing the structure of your company? Does everything go through IT? Is IT becoming more embedded into other aspects of your business (and becoming more ‘business-oriented’) or are you more open to SaaS systems / outsourcing and only using IT for when you need to integrate into your ERP system?

Input: We added a management-level position that’s focused on e-Commerce. Primary functions are to assist/guide sales and marketing efforts, and to identify the business requirements necessary for IT to provide the necessary tools.

IT is becoming more embedded in the business, but that’s largely possible because IT includes some significant business experience (three of us spent from 15-30 years in the business prior to joining IT)

Who drives e-research initiatives within your company and where is the idea generation coming from?

Input: The e-commerce director is the point person, but he draws on a team including sales, marketing, branch operations, and IT. Participation with other distributors through NAED, IDEA, business system user groups, and so forth is also a great source of ideas

More from the same distributor:

And what does this mean for budgeting? Are these IT budgets? Should every department have an “IT / e” budget or is this just an expectation of initiatives?

Input: The software and reporting are in the IT budget. Sales, Marketing, Branch Operations, and E-Commerce all have business objectives around “e”, and therefore they add resources via their own budgets as needed to meet them.

Many questions that beg discussion. And could this become a differentiator between progressive and reactive companies? Could it impact net profitability?

Input: It had better! The true impact has been difficult to quantify, but we’re getting better as we go along. Simply measuring sales doesn’t tell us much – unless a customer was going to drop us unless we offered a web solution (which has happened, but not often), then the sales could have been there anyway. We now measure how many “e” orders make it to the warehouse without inside sales touching them – considerable opportunity there. We’ve just started getting data about the specific activities that specific customers are doing on our site which will tell us, among other things, whether we’re shifting work from our people to the site.

And more input … and this sheds some light on the content question

Where should your catalog content come from? In a recent conversation with a leading e-commerce / website provider, their electrical clients were essentially evenly split between IDEA and Trade Service for their catalog content (and we have another client who will subscribe to both and use software (and human intervention) to select which one to use for each SKU) and another who will probably use IDEA … in other words, it’s muddled.

Input: We’re 100% supporting IDEA, and actively participating with their progress. We used to subscribe to TS as well, but found that their data was inadequate for a properly functioning web store (that was probably 3 years ago). Being an Allen-Bradley distributor, we’re going to be an IDEA customer no matter what, so that certainly weighed into our decision to make them our choice for getting to a single source. Most of our content on stock products came from our internal efforts (and we still expend a considerable amount of time here). But that was expensive, and impractical to extend to the rest of our catalog. We’re pushing for strong manufacturer commitment to IDEA, and for IDEA to take their offering to a new level (which is well under way).

How are you navigating the overall e-decision-making process? The catalog content process?

Input: In addition to the above, the key element has been buy in from the top. If our President had not made this a key business objective, it would never have gone anywhere.