Last week I visited an electrical distributor client to discuss customer service. Given the economic environment that has gripped the industry over the past 18 months, no one is surprised to hear that some companies have experienced customer service issues […]
If you are a distributor, and the business has been struggling, you might be thinking: Why should I hunker down and try to ride this economic downturn only to have to start all over trying to rebuild my wealth? I’ve […]
Maybe … especially if we (the industry, not your specific company) want profitability. You may remember SAP’s marketing theme of a couple of years ago that basically of “The best-run businesses run SAP”. With a multitude of electrical manufacturers turning […]
We wanted to title this “Looking Forward to 2010”, however, we debated on the word “forward” given the forecasts that we’re seeing. Consider: “There is so much uncertainty about the first half of next year that until you have a […]
In a market that many economist project to be flat for a while, manufacturers and distributors are looking at their back office to identify where they can gain efficiencies. Many companies rely on older ERP systems and only utilize between […]
In other words, a little bit of everything to end the week! August marks ElectricalTrends’ two year anniversary. During this time we’ve had over 28,195 visits resuting in 39,241 page views from 13,525 unique visitors (all numbers are according to […]
As most industry participants and observers know by now, Rexel has decided to standardize upon one ERP software system, Activant’s Eclipse package. Rexel had been operating different systems for a number of years and trying to aggregate information to support […]
We’ve been talking with distributors the last couple of weeks and a common refrain is the lack of profitability in much of their businesses. Many are attributing this to marketplace pricing strategies and some distributors’ desire to take share based […]
As we celebrate our 233rd birthday this weekend we wanted to wish you a wonderful weekend with family and loved ones. The Declaration of Independence was conceived based upon the concept that people had the “right” to pursue “life, liberty […]
or this could be called “protecting your back-side”!The economic challenges faced by many distributors creates concern amongst manufacturer credit personnel about a distributor’s ability to satisfy their obligations (pay their bills). This can particularly be an issue for smaller distributors […]
