IDEA Appoints New Leadership … Strongest Yet?

IDEA made a leadership move this week and potentially gave the electrical industry a reason to be thankful this Thanksgiving week.

The organization, essentially a joint venture between NEMA and NAED, announced an executive leadership team that combines the experience of NEMA (manufacturer interaction, standards setting and technical operational expertise) with experienced distribution and manufacturing technology sales leadership. Having been exposed to IDEA since it’s beginning (I was on the first marketing committee when I was with IMARK and helped recruit 34 IMARK distributors as early members), this appears to be the strongest leadership team that IDEA has ever fielded.

Paul Molitor, an Assistant VP Strategy & Policy with NEMA, was named president and Mike Wentz was promoted to EVP Sales & Marketing. The search committee consisted of two manufacturers and two distributors, hence both segments of the membership were well represented.

While I don’t know anything about Paul (other than his namesake was an excellent player for Hall of Fame player for the Milwaukee Brewers), a review of his LinkedIn profile is interesting. He’s spent almost six years at NEMA, time at a technology company as well as in other positions that involved operations and project management.  His NEMA tenure involved SmartGrid standards development, among other things.  Not knowing the specifics of him or his roles, considering the Smart Grid is a relatively new concept, he’s had some experience in working with standards development for new initiatives which inevitably involved “negotiating” with competitive suppliers to gain agreement on product standards.

And if products must meet a standard, it stands to reason that the attributes to describe the product (data) must also have standards. Hopefully he can bring this ability to IDEA and gain accelerated manufacturer acceptance.

Paul’s appointment may also signal a greater desire by manufacturers and/or NEMA to gain greater adoption of IDW standards, especially since one of NEMA’s value propositions is standards setting.

Now the challenge will be NAED delivering on its value to IDEA … generating distributor support given that NAED is supposed to be “the” distributor association in the electrical industry and represent electrical distribution.

According to a NAED press release, Tom Naber said ““We are extremely excited about IDEA’s new direction in leadership and the fresh approach Paul will bring to the organization,” said National Association of Electrical Distributors (NAED) President/CEO Tom Naber. “IDEA is important to the future of distribution and we will do what’s necessary to help this project be successful.” (as an aside, it’s interesting that NAED refers to IDEA as a “project” rather than an organization or industry initiative recognizing the financial commitments NAED members have made to IDEA and its joint ownership.

And this further made a recent article in TED a little surprising. The article titled “NAED Members React to Changes at IDEA” highlighted comments from a handful of distributors that were “less than positive”.  The article also emphasized that IDEA is supposed to be “the official technology service provider and eBusiness standards body of the electrical industry.”

While IDEA was conceived to be a standards body, its been a challenge due to the process. To be “the official technology service provider”, let alone expect this, is naive given the breadth of technology needs that distributors and manufacturers have (i.e. ERP companies, CRM, eCommerce, SFA, WMS, Internet security, etc). While there is a need that either an association or marketing groups could fill to provide due diligence and thought leadership in these areas, it’s not the role of IDEA to be “the provider”

Moving forward, IDEA may need to be considered (perhaps not legally) as a product driven company, identifying customer “needs”, prioritizing resources and then roll out new “products” that utilize data. Realistically, and due to resources, all of the products / services that distributors desire cannot be developed on their desired timeline … Rome wasn’t built in a day … plus the product offering needs to work for both manufacturers and distributors while also add value.  There is no need to replicate what manufacturers may currently offer. Distributors who do not support the organization for current services inhibit the ability of the organization to develop potential future initiatives … as it needs broad distribution support.

Consider, would you not support a manufacturer because they have some holes in their product line even though they have much of what else is needed and is “preferred” by many customers?

No data source will ever be 100% accurate. Not all suppliers will be part of an “industry” database for company-specific reasons (some of which are cost-driven). The question becomes, has the organization become incrementally better.

This week’s move by IDEA to appoint Paul Molitor as CEO / President and Mike Wentz as EVP Sales & Marketing gives the organization perhaps the best chance in a long time to deliver increased value to manufacturers, distributors, NAED and NEMA.

What do you think of the new “dynamic duo”? What do you want from IDEA and how do you think the industry (and/or associations) can move the initiative forward faster to benefit the industry? And if you don’t use IDEA data, what would IDEA need to do to get you to consider using it?