Interesting article. Agree with some of it and am hopeful and optimistic about industry collaboration towards the better tomorrow. Maybe a test project or two, like helping Ukrainians, could be a uniting point. Our small company already raises over six figures annually for charity in partnership with our vendors. Outside of these important altruistic goals, the business challenge for distribution imo is that we have size disparity, mostly small companies like us, but also some billion dollar ones who can act more like Tesla than we can. The majority of us are just trying to hang in there and address day to day challenges that threaten our businesses. There's not a lot of extra bandwidth to both keep the boat afloat and make speed. Whether it's supply chain disruption causing us to have nothing to sell, the threat of large commodity price swings, a ransomware attack, a key vendor who drops us, a massive customer who shoves off, an hourly employee crisis, or any number of other threats, we have our hands full with tactical matters. Data we need. The product dimensional information you mention should not be a discussion, should just be a given. But share our sales data with everyone else? That is a risk we aren't ready to take yet. The behemoths have departments of MBAs we don't have. Why give them a road map to the cheddar? But, as an optimist like you, I dream about a more advanced world for distribution. Compared to retail we are way behind. Expensive labor sits idle at our customers while we spend exorbitant resources just trying to find out where our and their backorders are. In contrast, personally we are getting automatic step by step updates on the status of the garden supplies we ordered for the weekend project, a project we may or may not get around to. Perhaps those making and sourcing items that we deliver should invest more into systems and standards that pass data to distributors so we can help customers finish their projects, many projects that are critical, projects that will fight diseases like Cancer, and projects that will help those in need like Ukrainians. I get it that vendors make their money by locking down specifications and not by enhancing supply chain data, but we independent distributors can't really get past tactical emergencies without gaining data on material flow at this point. This is a major distraction from getting into Utopian mode. Again, we aspire to get there, but a lot of friction on the flywheel makes that mostly an afterthought today. While not as awe inspiring, achieving the foundation of exchanging basic transactional data is still the priority. We have to crawl before we walk, and walk before we run. But yes, we can and will run some day. We must.
Interesting article. Agree with some of it and am hopeful and optimistic about industry collaboration towards the better tomorrow. Maybe a test project or two, like helping Ukrainians, could be a uniting point. Our small company already raises over six figures annually for charity in partnership with our vendors. Outside of these important altruistic goals, the business challenge for distribution imo is that we have size disparity, mostly small companies like us, but also some billion dollar ones who can act more like Tesla than we can. The majority of us are just trying to hang in there and address day to day challenges that threaten our businesses. There's not a lot of extra bandwidth to both keep the boat afloat and make speed. Whether it's supply chain disruption causing us to have nothing to sell, the threat of large commodity price swings, a ransomware attack, a key vendor who drops us, a massive customer who shoves off, an hourly employee crisis, or any number of other threats, we have our hands full with tactical matters. Data we need. The product dimensional information you mention should not be a discussion, should just be a given. But share our sales data with everyone else? That is a risk we aren't ready to take yet. The behemoths have departments of MBAs we don't have. Why give them a road map to the cheddar? But, as an optimist like you, I dream about a more advanced world for distribution. Compared to retail we are way behind. Expensive labor sits idle at our customers while we spend exorbitant resources just trying to find out where our and their backorders are. In contrast, personally we are getting automatic step by step updates on the status of the garden supplies we ordered for the weekend project, a project we may or may not get around to. Perhaps those making and sourcing items that we deliver should invest more into systems and standards that pass data to distributors so we can help customers finish their projects, many projects that are critical, projects that will fight diseases like Cancer, and projects that will help those in need like Ukrainians. I get it that vendors make their money by locking down specifications and not by enhancing supply chain data, but we independent distributors can't really get past tactical emergencies without gaining data on material flow at this point. This is a major distraction from getting into Utopian mode. Again, we aspire to get there, but a lot of friction on the flywheel makes that mostly an afterthought today. While not as awe inspiring, achieving the foundation of exchanging basic transactional data is still the priority. We have to crawl before we walk, and walk before we run. But yes, we can and will run some day. We must.