Fastenal reported first-quarter sales of $1.86 billion, an increase of 9.1% year over year and 9.6% over the final quarter of 2022. The company attributed the quarterly bump to "further growth in underlying demand in markets tied to industrial capital goods and commodities, which more than offset a modest contraction for construction supplies."
MSC Industrial Supply will be the exclusive e-commerce distributor of metalworking, maintenance, repair and operating supplies for MachiningCloud, an internet platform that offers 3D views of its goods. MachiningCloud, which has been in business since 2020, has more than 100,000 customers and works with more than 50 brands, with plans to sell more than 200 brands by the end of the year.
Wholesale prices in the US dropped 0.5% in March from the previous month, driven largely by falling energy prices, according to the Labor Department's producer price index. Year-over-year wholesale inflation was up 2.7% in March, a significant decline from the 4.7% recorded in February.
Artificial intelligence will account for $17.5 billion of the global supply chain management software by 2028 and the Asia-Pacific region will be the largest supplier of systems, according to a ResearchAndMarkets.com report. The report's authors note AI-enabled supply chains are 67% more effective than non-AI counterparts and material movement and tracking currently accounts for the largest sub-segment of AI supply chain software market.
An excellent customer experience is essential to ensure customers return, writes SmartBrief's Emily Snyder, who outlines three ways marketers can improve. Act like a consultant to solve pain points for customers, use first-party data to gain customer insights and continuously test customer experience to remove obstacles, Snyder advises.
Savvy leaders have a process for making decisions based on emotional and moral intelligence rather than just logic, write Doug Lennick and Chuck Wachendorfer of leadership development company think2perform and co-authors of "Don't Wait for Someone Else to Fix It." The pair detail their four R's of good decisions: recognize, reflect, reframe and respond.
The "always on" nature of being a leader who operates "in a fishbowl" energizes Bruce Chinn, CEO of Chevron Phillips Chemical, who sees the constant scrutiny as a call to engage in relationships with those around him and pay attention to feedback to "make sure that your behavior aligns with what you say." "You can't sit in some ivory tower and hope that things happen on their own," Chinn says.
