Roughly 500 people traveled to Indianapolis March 4–7 for the 14th annual University of Industrial Distribution.

It was the fourth consecutive sellout year for the program, which is sponsored by 28 trade associations and the Industrial Distribution programs at Purdue University/the University of Indiana and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

“This session sold out faster than any other session. We were sold out by February,” said Kathleen DeMarco, chairwoman of the UID steering committee and executive director of the Fluid Power Distributors Assn., which helped sponsor the event.

“That's a great problem to have,” DeMarco added.

Course offerings covered various aspects of distribution, ranging from sales planning and solution-based selling, to improving the bottom line, creating and managing channels, and advanced inventory management.

Attendees represented a wide spectrum of the distribution industry, with members of manufacturing operations joining employees and executives from various types of distribution companies.

Brian Becker, vice president of finance for Border States Electric, an electrical distributor based in Fargo, N.D., said his company sends a few people to the program every year.

This year, Border State sent five employees, including Becker, to the event. Each of them, whether it was Border State's human resources manager or one of the two regional managers the company sent, found the sessions they attended valuable in their day-to-day work, he said.

“All five people came back with some positive feedback from the entire session,” Becker said. “The topics seemed to cover some timely issues in distribution as a whole, and it was nice to network with other distributors to find out how they're handling the same issues we're handling.”