Power transmission and motion control has long been core to MDM’s industrial hardgoods audience, and it’s an industry sector that has seen tremendous consolidation over the past two decades.

Meanwhile, it’s also seen considerable innovation in the current decade in the form of raising industry awareness, career development, and especially in product information management, or PIM.

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Product data sharing has long been a sticking point in industrial distribution, at least in the Americas, as distributors and manufacturers often like to keep their data playing cards close to the vest. 

But both sides have seen significant benefits from collaborating on PIM data, and both the Power Transmission Distributors Association and the Bearing Specialists Association have driven that forward by creating and expanding the Produce Information Exchange Platform, or PIE, launched at the start of 2023.

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Our latest MDM Podcast episode features my conversation with a pair of longtime PT/MC industry veterans — Brian Short, who garnered PTDA’s Warren Pike lifetime achievement award this past fall, and Bill Shepard, who has spent the past 38 years at bearings distributor BDI and helped develop the PIE platform, seen at www.pietechnologyplatform.org.

I had each of them share their career journey, their perspective on the biggest changes they’ve seen in the industry, the role of AI in industrial distribution; the state of PIM data sharing and the PIE platform, and more.

Listen to the episode via the audio player above, and you can view all of our past episode at our podcasts archive here.