Associated Wholesale Grocers reported consolidated net sales of $10.8 billion in 2021, up 1.68% from 2020 and a company record. The distributor also had $9.8 billion in cooperative sales, a 1.39% year-over-year increase.
The overwhelming majority of global engineers surveyed by Avnet said they expect to wait longer and pay more for components due to the semiconductor shortage, while roughly half said their production schedules have been delayed by three to six months. Many engineers are using alternatives such as drop-in replacement components or redesigns.
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Distributors can save money on labor, training and overtime by adopting warehouse automation and autonomous guided vehicles, say industry experts. AGVs can also minimize building damage and worker accidents, while automation can free up workers for more essential tasks.
Supply chain management is getting an overhaul, swapping its right-suppliers/best-cost dictate for broader stability and resilience, writes Willy Shih, a management practice professor at Harvard Business School. Some companies may choose to be less global, but all should look at logistics, sustainability and supplier health, and Shih explains how.
Distributors can transform sales operations and improve their productivity and efficiency by evaluating sales channels to determine what change will do the most, redesigning the sales process and carrying out the change, writes Tom Gale. "The most successful efforts create incremental change in the form of pilots and projects that help to drive the change without blowing the company up," Gale writes.
Business-to-business marketing experts talk about the increasingly blurred line between B2B and business-to-consumer marketing, spurred by changes to buying behavior that are opening up new channels and creativity for B2B marketers. Ultimately, though the two disciplines cross over more, B2B has distinct needs, as The Marketing Practice's David van Schaick explains: "You need to create attention, fame, reach and emotional impact (exactly the same as B2C) -- but you also need to create spaces to be a bit more in-depth."
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CEOs have six key high-level duties involving purpose, alignment, stakeholders and their personal effectiveness, writes McKinsey senior partner Scott Keller. "This is actually quite a liberating idea, because being great at being the CEO does not mean you have to be great at any one thing -- you just need to be great at managing across them," Keller writes.
Some people are "in charge" but don't deserve to call themselves leaders because they can't get anyone to willingly follow them, says retired Navy SEAL commander Rich Diviney. "The leadership attributes are empathy, selflessness, authenticity, decisiveness, and accountability," Diviney says.
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