Maintenance, repair and operations buyers are showing increased interest in using Amazon Business to procure office supplies, industrial supplies and janitorial and sanitation products, writes David Gordon. Distributors should highlight free and value-added services and consider total cost of acquisition instead of just item costs when working with large accounts, Gordon writes.

Ingram Micro has named Paul Bay as its executive vice president and president of global technology solutions as CEO Alain Monie prepares to "focus more of his energy" on cloud, commerce and life-cycle services.

Amazon is continually updating the skills of its employees -- warehouse workers as well as software engineers -- in anticipation of future business needs. "The most consistent thing we see that's changing is the need for some level of technical skills in any job," says Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of worldwide human resources.

Robotics offers clear benefits within distribution centers and can improve overall supply chain operations by sharing data with warehouse and labor management systems, writes HighJump Chief Technology Officer Sean Elliott. For instance, robotics can reduce reverse logistics costs by providing real-time data on inventory location, he writes.

A majority of business-to-business buyers say that unavailable and hard-to-find products are the biggest frustration they've faced when buying online during the past year, according to a Digital Commerce 360 survey. Buyers said they also frequently experienced poor search functionality, unclear shipping costs and poor mobile performance.

Productivity can wane without a specific, actionable and relevant plan that can be measured, writes Naphtali Hoff. He offers five steps for planning your productivity, including categorizing tasks by priority, setting goals using the SMART model and physically organizing your workspace.

Don't miss the NAW 2020 Executive Summit: INNOVATE TO DOMINATE, Jan. 28-30! Our program will provide for you a road map to innovation as you peer into the future of wholesale distribution, explore marketplace platforms, and examine the points of view of today's brightest business experts and next-generation distribution entrepreneurs who are creating new business models to satisfy industry and customer needs, and create new demand. Get ready to network with other best-in-class distributors. Register today.

"Unlock the Power of Inventory Analytics: Aligning Working Capital to Customer Experience to Maximize Your Bottom Line" is based on 15 years of distribution research. It reveals the fundamentals and contemporary practices for designing the role of inventory in this era of ever-evolving new business models. You'll receive an inventory management framework, customer service metrics, a step-by-step implementation approach, real-world distributor case studies and a plan-of-action road map. Take a look by reading the introduction.

If you missed our recent live webinar, "Reboot the Real World: Beating Disruption through Human-Centric Innovations," sponsored by SAP, you can replay the webinar now. In it, you'll hear Mark Dancer explore how to win by being human, engage customers through shared interests and mutual advantage, and optimize benefits through intentional combinations of human and technology forces of change. He shared critical findings from NAW's upcoming Innovate to Dominate research study.