Graybar First National Chain to Endorse NEMRA POS Standards

Graybar becomes first major distributor to endorse the NEMRA POS / POT Minimum Reporting Standards and explicitly express report for rep initiative.

Last year NEMRA and its NMG (NEMRA Manufacturer Group) took a leadership role in promoting POS / POT (point of sale, point of transfer) standards for the industry. The objective was to standardize processes, improve operational efficiency, reduce operating costs for manufacturers and distributors, help improve reporting transparency ensure rep compensation accuracy. To date 34 manufacturers have endorsed the strategy and now one of the industry’s largest distributors, Graybar, has endorsed the initiative.

A 2014 study commissioned by NEMRA revealed challenges in POS reporting and that reps will redirect business from one distributor to another if they feel they will not be compensated and the customer is relatively indifferent to which distributor gets the business. Obviously this can impact revenue opportunities to those with RDCs / CDCs who do not effectively share POS / POT information with their manufacturers.

According to the NEMRA release, Graybar’s Jeff Netherton, VP of Product Management, stated “We know that manufacturer representatives are an important element of the supply chain who can act as advocates for our suppliers.  Graybar offers up to 28 data fields to our suppliers related to POS. We can work with suppliers to identify their needs and jointly determine the appropriate fields to transmit to them through FTP in compliance with the NEMRA recommended standard.”

Graybar is the first national chain to endorse the strategy. NEMRA is in discussion with other national chains, some leading independents and a few software / service providers to further bring these standards to the industry … and there is no cost to participating in the initiative…just a desire to ensure that reps are compensated fairly.

The NEMRA POS standard has the potential to also help distributors and manufacturers improve business analytics and distributor-specific planning. While a key component is ensuring customer confidentiality by only having zip code level information shared among trading partners (more detail can be shared if both parties agree), more data and more data at the zip code level can facility the usage of analytic tools to gain a better sense of product movement, usage and conducting product gap analyses as well as the development of marketing initiatives.

The NEMRA POS / POT initiative is

• open to all manufacturers and all distributors
• also open to manufacturers with direct sales organizations as well as lighting manufacturers
• soliciting additional endorsements
• free to participate
• will be evolving to include “commodity” products and also provide recommendations to improve the manufacturer to reporting processes

To learn more about the NEMRA POS / POT Minimum Reporting Standards contact either Ken Hooper, President of NEMRA, or myself as CMG has been assisting NEMRA in this initiative.