October 10, 2012

Lessons from Avnet’s Rapid Growth

Leave a Comment / Top Distributor Sectors, Subscriber Only, Electronics, Companies / Jenel Stelton-Holtmeier

In November, Roy Vallee, executive chairman of electronics distributor Avnet (NYSE: AVT), will retire after 35 years with the company. He served as president and COO from 1992 until 1998, when he was promoted to CEO - a position he held until July 2011. During his tenure, Vallee saw Avnet grow from a $2 billion company to a $26 billion company. Vallee recently spoke with Associate Editor Jenel Stelton-Holtmeier about his career at Avnet and the role acquisitions played in the success of the distributor.

MDM: Avnet's growth is in large part attributed to its acquisition strategy. But integration can sometimes be a challenge - finding a balance between maintaining the culture and what attracted Avnet to the company while at the same time making the acquired company a part of Avnet. How did Avnet achieve success with this? And how can other companies make it a smoother process?

Roy Vallee: We did our first large-scale integration back in 1993. And we had to figure out then the best way to deal with it. But one of the first things we decided was that we'd document the process that we used so that with our next acquisition, we could ...

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Commentary: The Power of Segmentation

Leave a Comment / Subscriber Only, Sales & Marketing / Tom Gale

The wholesale distribution industry is about to experience a smack-down wrestling match with big data, and in many cases, big data is going to win. Why? Through no particular fault of any management role or responsibility within an organization, many companies don’t have a data management policy. That means there may be multiple records of customer bill-to and ship-to with dirty data – which may be as simple ...

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MDM Industrial Inflation Index: August 2012

Leave a Comment / Top Distributor Sectors, Subscriber Only, Research & Analytics, Economic Trends / MDM Staff

Modern Distribution Management's Industrial Inflation Index measures a cross-section of industrial supplies.

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Make Your Data Work to Grow Profitability

Leave a Comment / Subscriber Only, Strategy, Sales & Marketing, Management / Lindsay Konzak

MDM Editor Lindsay Konzak recently attended the Advanced Profitability Improvement Conference in Arizona, featuring some of the top speakers on wholesale distribution strategy and management, including Brent Grover, Bruce Merrifield, Tony Pericle, Jon Schreibfeder and more. The focus of the conference was how distributors can make smarter and more informed decisions about where to target their resources to boost margins going into 2013. Analytics should be the foundation of any move on this front, the speakers said. This article presents a summary of main ideas presented by some of the speakers at the conference.

Expenses exceed gross profit on too many sales, according to Randy MacLean of Waypoint Analytics. In fact, he says, “there is no correlation between gross margins and profit.” He was speaking at the semiannual Advanced Profitability Improvement Conference in September in Scottsdale, AZ. So what happens? Where do the profits go?

MacLean says there are five ways profits disappear before reaching the bottom line.

The cost to serve a ...

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Bain Capital Agrees to Buy Apex Tool Group for $1.6B

Leave a Comment / Top Distributor Sectors, Subscriber Only, News, Mergers & Acquisitions, Free, Finance, Featured Breaking News / MDM Staff

Apex Tool Group is a joint venture between Danaher and Cooper Industries.

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Top Election Concerns for Distributors

Leave a Comment / Subscriber Only, Operations, Legal Issues in Wholesale Distribution / Jenel Stelton-Holtmeier

This article looks at what concerns distributors most about the upcoming election, as noted in a recent MDM survey. In addition to the survey, MDM spoke with distributor associations that are playing an active role in educating and speaking for their members on critical topics in Washington DC.

While the election does not directly determine laws and regulations, the winners of the races – from the President down to local contests – will play a role in the country’s direction for the next several years.

It’s important for distributors to make sure their voices are being heard.

And it’s important for “everyone to …

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