The NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence has announced its newest, groundbreaking research study, Driving Profitable Growth: A Distributor’s Playbook to Generate–Manage–Sustain Competitive Advantage, based on a two-year research consortium conducted by Texas A&M University’s Global Supply Chain Laboratory.
Go to www.naw.org/growth or call 202.872.0885 to learn more and order copies.
Growth is imperative. Wholesaler-distributors that are not growing are essentially dying in slow motion. Achieving top-line growth is becoming increasingly difficult given today's economic challenges and customer demands. That is why the path to achieving and sustaining profitable growth needs a systematic and dynamic approach.
Driving Profitable Growth: A Distributor's Playbook to Generate–Manage–Sustain Competitive Advantage is the first research study in wholesale distribution to examine both public and private firms and uncover a roadmap that addresses the three dimensions — generating, managing, and sustaining — of profitable growth. This study provides wholesaler-distributors with a growth playbook that is based on research and analytics instead of anecdotal information.
The research combines rigorous analytics that were collected from a decade of financial data with input from wholesaler-distributors from multiple lines of trade. It reflects the current environment and determines the roadmap to the future. This study speaks to the growth planning and execution issues all distributors face in leading and growing their organizations. There is no more important time than right now for distribution management teams to read this study.
Driving Profitable Growth includes:
- 95 best practices on growth from actual distributors that are easy to understand and visually depicted on the accompanying wall map
- 40 ready-to-implement action steps
- 60 real-world distributor examples from across the industry.
The accompanying four-color wall map presents a comprehensive collection of four growth frameworks — each vividly presenting the findings in a systematic and easy-to-digest manner:
- Framework 1 focuses on introducing the three key dimensions of growth — generating, managing, and sustaining.
- Framework 2 lists a collection of nine growth strategies and their drivers — leverage, penetrate, broaden, add, reach out, expand, build, innovate, and diversify.
- Framework 3 outlines a list of best practices required to achieve profitability and cash flow while aggressively growing the business.
- Framework 4 presents the set of growth blind spots to avoid in a firm’s journey to value creation.
Kevin Kampe, President of Womack Machine Supply, said this after reading Driving Profitable Growth: “The Growth frameworks provide the ultimate distribution playbook! We will definitely implement key best practices from these frameworks to leverage our growth.”
This research study is the fifth one created through collaboration between the NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence and Texas A&M University’s Global Supply Chain Laboratory—two leaders in wholesale distribution education and training. These organizations joined forces in January 2009 to launch an alliance dedicated to furthering the understanding and application of best practices in wholesale distribution. Through this alliance, the Council for Research on Distributor Best Practices (CRDBP) was created. The mission of the CRDBP is to create competitive advantage for wholesaler-distributors through development of new industry research, educational programs, and publications to deliver that research and knowledge to industry executives and
their management teams. Learn more about the CRDBP and the other consortia atwww.naw.org/crdbp.
