NAED looks to"proactive'' era
By Staff -- Industrial Distribution, 6/1/1998
Minneapolis, Minn.--Introducing innovations for a new, proactive era was the main theme of the National Assn. of Electrical Distributors' annual meeting, attended by more than 2,100 distributors and manufacturers in May.NAED, which relocated its headquarters to St. Louis, Mo. last fall, is celebrating its 90th year. Outgoing chairman Lee Hite called the past year one of "rebirth'' with the streamlining of NAED's board of directors and restructuring the organization to serve members better.
Topping NAED's efforts to help distributors prepare for the 21st Century and improve margins is the development of an Industry Data Warehouse and an industry Extranet, which will connect channel partners in secure electronic commerce. The IDW will be a single-point repository of accurate and timely product data from participating manufacturers, from which distributors will instantly retrieve information. In March, NAED and the National Electrical Manufacturers Assn. announced they would jointly develop IDW, which is slated to be available to the industry next spring.
Benefits to joining IDW include improved synchronization of pricing data, accuracy, and more timely updates on products and pricing, available seven days a week. "This will make electronic commerce more effective,'' says Jim Ford of Graybar Electric Co., Inc., co-chairman of the NAED-NEMA technology committee. "Today many such transactions fail because of bad data.''
As part of the initiative new standard format guidelines and product descriptor database guidelines will be developed. Triad Inc. of Livermore, Calif. was hired to develop the IDW software and operate the data warehouse, similar to what the company has done for the auto parts industry. NAED and NEMA also formed a not-for-profit association, the Industry Data Exchange Assn., Inc., to oversee implementing IDW and the Extranet. IDEA is comprised of 17 distributor and 17 manufacturer members.
If they haven't begun to already, electrical distributors were advised to begin figuring out how they will incorporate new product data into their existing systems. The main idea, says John Haluska, vice president of information technology at Thomas & Betts Corp., a manufacturer in Memphis, Tenn., is "to talk the same speak.''
"I have great hopes that IDW will help drag the nagging transaction costs out of the industry,'' says Alexander "Sandy'' Cutler, of Eaton Corp., a manufacturer in Cleveland, Ohio. More than 300 people attended a forum on electronic commerce where the IDW and industry Extranet were described. I
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