Grainger improved overall and organic sales in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, building on Q4 gains by accelerating daily-sales growth in January, February and March. The company reported $238 million in profit, up nearly 38%, on sales of $3.08 billion.
With a strong international network, chemical distributor Univar Solutions has handled supply chain disruptions well, says executive Nick Powell. Scale, performance and industry relationships have given Univar "a greater share of volume and product availability than many of the smaller regional players, and that's driven customers to us," Powell says.
Sysco-commissioned research on the foodservice industry during the pandemic found that 14% of US restaurants have closed since the pandemic began, with sit-down locations affected further. US sales for December remained down 21% year over year, versus a high of 52% decline in May 2020.
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Warehouses are implementing voice-enabled solutions to free workers from constantly having to refer to papers, writes Marcus Jeffery, an executive at Ivanti Wavelink. "[T]hrough voice technology, workers can achieve up to 25 percent more productivity and a 35 percent drop in errors," writes Jeffery.
How to transform specialty retail using AI Retailers who choose to leverage AI and machine learning to solve critical business problems sooner rather than later will reap the benefits, as investments in AI yield more value as they mature. Read Google Cloud's survey report to learn about the most common and highest value use cases for AI in retail. Download Now
Intermediaries are stepping in to fill the data gaps left by sunsetting cookies and are betting on direct consumer participation models to generate valuable data sources as larger platforms increasingly guard consumer analytics. For example, DataLucent launched a platform that rewards consumers who share personal social media data in exchange for rewards and special offers.
Employees want more autonomy, opportunities to contribute their ideas and to be seen as colleagues, writes Beverly Kaye. "As you give people more power to create, make decisions and truly affect the success of the team, their job satisfaction (and your odds of keeping them) will go up," Kaye writes.
Please help NAW by participating in a 5-7-minute survey, "Post-Pandemic Leadership Strategies for Distributors," conducted by researchers at Distribution Strategy Group, to help us provide answers to support all distributors. By sharing your experiences in this completely confidential survey, you can join with hundreds of other executives in ensuring that the industry learns as much as possible from the unique experiences of 2020 and 2021. Please make sure your voice is heard in this important research project.
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Guest blogger Jason Hein of Bloomreach says, "The first thing that distributors must do is to stop competing with Amazon Business and start competing like Amazon. Competing with Amazon implies a "head-to-head" battle of tactical process excellence -- where the way to win is to do what you do better than Amazon does. Some B2B distributors consider things like contract pricing, inventory management, services provided to customers or product expertise to be "moats" that will protect their business from Amazon." Read his post.
