City Electric Supply’s latest value-added service launch is not rooted in a single customer pain point. It is more the result of many small ones.

As CES expanded its reach across North America, its branch teams kept running into adjacent opportunities in industrial settings — particularly with customers who already trusted the distributor’s local service model but needed more support around automation, controls and Siemens product access.

For CES — No. 8 on MDM’s 2026 Top Electrical Distributors List — that steady branch-level demand eventually became a signal: industrial automation could not remain an occasional, location-by-location capability. It needed to become a formal service platform.

Turning Customer Demand into a Service Platform

That is the thinking behind CES’ launch of Industrial Automation Solutions, or IAS — a new offering developed and launched in partnership with Siemens Digital Industries. The service is designed to help customers design, build and improve industrial automation and control systems, while giving CES’ more than 700 North American branches a centralized technical resource to support customers that need more than product availability.

“I don’t think it was a specific problem per se,” CES Vice President of Operations R.T. Smith told MDM at the company’s biennial CES Connect event in Nashville on June 13. “As our business has grown and scaled and we’ve gotten into new markets, it was more of an ongoing request from our base to broaden our services. These guys are familiar with us, obviously, and they know our strong history of service. I think it was more of an ongoing ask from those guys to broaden into some of these more industrial-focused products.”

That distinction is important. IAS is not being positioned as a pivot away from CES’ core electrical distribution model. Rather, executives described it as an extension of the company’s service culture — one that gives branches more to say “yes” to when customers ask for industrial control components, automation support or technical help beyond traditional electrical supply.

Alongside Siemens, the IAS launch was made possible through additional partnerships with fellow key suppliers and software providers Rittal, Eplan, Wieland Electric, Lutze Automation and Grace Technologies.

City Electric Supply’s additional launch partners for its Industrial Automated Solutions service

Smith described IAS as a full range of products and services geared to support a broad range of automation and control manufacturers, with the service component central to the offering.

“We’re going to be more than putting a brown box on the shelf — and we’re good at that,” Smith added. “We’re good at doing that and doing it strategically. But I think the bigger message is going to be with all the services we provide. We’re going to have application engineering, control panel design and manufacturing, drive specialists, PLC programming, troubleshooting in all those areas. It’s going to be a wide range of services.”

Moving Beyond the Product Sale

That framing reflects a broader distributor trend: value-added services have become one of the best ways for distributors to maintain relevance in competitive markets where customers have more buying options than ever. The differentiator is no longer just access to inventory. It is the ability to reduce complexity, save time and help customers make better technical decisions.

For CES, IAS builds on the company’s recent launch of its One-Line Service that streamlines the process of ordering panelboards and switchboards. The service — first developed in 2019 and formally expanded into a nationwide offering in 2024 — allows contractors to move from diagram to finished product faster through CES fulfillment centers and Siemens-trained teams. CES has said that process can reduce a timeline that traditionally takes weeks or months down to days.

Jaime Marujo, CES Vice President of Operations, said One-Line created a blueprint for how CES could centralize support while still enabling its entrepreneurial branch network.

“I think it set the tone for what our branches will look like five, ten years down the road and the core of CES as an electrical distributor,” he shared. “If you think of five years back and what our branch network looks like today, what our capabilities are to service our customers, solutions that we have in place — no one would have ever guessed that in ten years we’d be in the position we are.”

Applying the One-Line Playbook

IAS is the next step in that evolution. Like One-Line, it depends on a combination of local customer relationships and centralized technical support. CES is building the offering through a “center of excellence” that sits within its centralized branch services organization, with a team intended to support branches on opportunities that require greater industrial automation expertise.

That structure matters because CES’ branch culture is built on local autonomy. Smith said the company learned from One-Line that centralized services require clear communication, branch education and proof points that show how a new process helps rather than replaces local decision-making.

“One-Line has been a tremendous success and a tremendous add to our market offering,” Smith beamed. “It’s a little bit outside of our norm, being a centralized process. The main thing is educating our branches and the branch teams on the process. One-Line taught us how to more effectively do that, and IAS will be a smoother launch because of it.”

In practical terms, CES leaders expect IAS to support both existing customers and new customer acquisition. The easiest first opportunities, Marujo said, will come from customers already doing business with CES — especially those with Siemens needs the distributor previously could not fully support.

Some of those customers may be contractors. Others may be MRO contacts inside industrial facilities. Marujo pointed to CES’ strength in rural America, where many manufacturing facilities operate and where local branch relationships are often deep:

“Our hope is that when a customer thinks of all things Siemens, they think of City Electric. Whether it’s a drive, a PLC, a push button, industrial control products, starters, a panelboard, something with our One-Line Service, a switchboard — all things Siemens.”

Siemens’ Critical Role

The Siemens partnership is a key part of the story. CES leaders said the company has had a relationship with Siemens for years, but the alignment has accelerated over the past two years as both companies collaborated more closely on One-Line and now IAS.

Smith said CES could have launched some version of IAS without Siemens, but not at the same scale or level of effectiveness.

“They bring an extremely high level of quality products to market, a lot of engineering tech support, and their education and training is going to be key with this,” Smith said. “The main thing is we communicate well. We sit down, we hash out problems, and there’s a strong appetite and desire on both sides to do that. Their partnership is making IAS launch to the extent we wanted it to.”

Marujo described the relationship as a strong fit between Siemens’ operating model and CES’ entrepreneurial structure, with Siemens showing a willingness to support CES’ efforts to create a different path to market for categories that have traditionally required more specialized access or technical support.

That dynamic is also where IAS becomes a broader case study for distribution. CES is not simply adding a line card. It is using supplier alignment, internal training, centralized expertise and branch-level customer knowledge to create a service model that is meant to widen the distributor’s role in the customer’s workflow.

Equipping Branches without Replacing Local Autonomy

Operationally, IAS will require education before it produces full network adoption. CES leaders said the rollout is already moving, but intentionally not at full speed. The team is largely in place, with additional business development resources and UL panel shop capabilities still being added. Marujo said CES has purposely “slow rolled” the launch because even partial buy-in across a branch network of roughly 800 locations would create significant demand.

“You only get one chance to make a first impression,” Marujo said. “We don’t want to have a branch have an opportunity and us fumble the ball a bit.”

That slow-roll approach is also designed to make branches more comfortable with the offering. Marujo said some branches will be hesitant because they do not view themselves as automation experts. Others may have customers that justify stocking certain components locally. The center of excellence is meant to give both groups a place to turn.

Smith said that support structure will keep IAS from becoming a simple training handoff.

“The beauty of the IAS team is that’s going to be what our branches lean on to help them identify opportunities, have conversations, address problems, and they’re going to work arm in arm with the branches,” he said. “It’s not going to be solely dependent on branches to say, ‘All right, find us business.’ They’ll have some tools and they’ll be equipped to a degree, but they’ll have a safety net.”

A Broader Model for Distributor Differentiation

For CES, the success metrics will include the basics — revenue, customer expansion and branch adoption. But executives also described the offering as part of a longer-term repositioning of what CES can mean to customers.

If One-Line gave CES a repeatable model for turning a specialized process into a scalable branch-supported service, IAS appears designed to apply that playbook to a larger technical category. The goal is to help customers solve automation-related problems while allowing CES to deepen existing relationships, enter new verticals and become harder to replace.

That is the strategic value of the launch. It gives CES another answer to a question every distributor faces: How do you remain essential when customers have more ways than ever to buy products?

In CES’ case, the answer is to keep building services around the branch — and to make those services technical enough, scalable enough and customer-facing enough to create a different kind of value.