LightFair, which traditionally has been the lighting industry’s preeminent show, was held the same time as the NAED National. While I was not able to attend this year, Linda Longo, Executive Editor of US Lighting Trends, a service of Channel […]
Just like your car needs gas, or an electrical charge, to operate, so does your digitalization effort, or more specifically, your business, need data, to operate. And in both cases, you want that “fuel” to come directly from the source. […]
Everyone is talking about digitalization, the need to automate functions to streamline business processes and support personnel shortages in some areas, and the desire for “information transparency.” It all takes time and money and, at the core of it for […]
Over the past year or so there has been much discussion in the electrical distribution industry about digitalization and process improvement. Some of it is company specific, some of it is discussion about the potential for broader industry initiatives that, […]
Over the past few months, I’ve talked to some distributors that recently either upgraded their ERP system or undertook the significant step of a conversion from one platform to another. Being curious, and not having participated in one, I inquired […]
At the recent NEMRA Annual Conference I was introduced to a potential service to the industry called mETaL that offers a cloud-based service that could “connect” disparate systems between reps and manufacturers. The goal is to improve communications and data […]
ChatGPT is all the rage lately. People are swarming to it, asking questions, conceiving new capabilities and then there is the “fear” of jobs that will be replaced, papers submitted for academic (and business) credit that are AI driven and […]
Last week’s NAED South Central brought an end to the trilogy of NAED regional conferences this year (here’s feedback from the NAED Eastern and the NAED Western.) While there was much information gathered from one-on-one meetings with manufacturers, distributors and […]
It’s been a number of years since Forrester Research and Gartner foreshadowed the demise of electrical distributors and forecasted that the business would 1) go online and 2) be taken over by Amazon and national chains. The part they missed […]
Each element of the channel is talking about information sharing and digitizing of processes. Distributors seek “better” and “more” product content to power their websites, manufacturers and distributors talk about the need for “data” to enable them to do “analytics”, […]
