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Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas is reorganizing the way it goes to market in its 48 branches. Executives told us the new structure will unify Avnet EM's product offerings throughout the region and utilize its specialty divisions more effectively.
"Within our more concentrated markets, our specialty structure works really well," Ed Smith, president of Avnet EM Americas, told us. "In other markets, we need to reach out and touch more customers with more products."
Currently, three specialty divisions -- Avnet Electronics Marketing, Avnet Memec, and Avnet Embedded -- sell and support their respective linecards throughout the Americas. Those divisions will remain intact in 15 markets. In the other markets (which the company now calls "EMA" markets), all products and services provided by the three specialty units will be combined into a single, unified linecard. "Instead of having three people selling parts of the linecard, we have nine people selling the whole linecard," Smith said.
The new structure will also streamline customer interaction within the Avnet branches. Currently, Avnet Memec sells a limited linecard of semiconductor products. Avnet Embedded sells motherboards, chassis, and subassemblies, and Avnet EM sells the remainder of the product offerings, including IP&E. Customers may deal with as many as three Avnet salespeople to source a BOM. "Now these accounts can be handled by a single person," Smith said.
The reorganization does not redeploy FAEs or technical support services within the branches, Avnet said. These resources are simply no longer tied to a specialty division.
The working model within Avnet refers to markets as "specialized" of "EMA." In the Northeast, for example, the specialized markets include Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Rochester, N.Y. The EMA markets include Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey.
The distribution market in general continually reevaluates how to deploy resources. Distributors increasingly have been hiring engineers to help customers with design and bring increasingly complex products to market. In sales-driven businesses such as distribution, engineers are expensive. Distributors have to allocate their technical resources where they will be most effective.
In addition, broadline distributors such as {complink 577|Avnet Inc.} and {complink 453|Arrow Electronics Inc.} are competing with catalogue distributors for small and emerging customers. These accounts typically source a wide array of products in small volumes, and broadlines have been struggling to provide the right mix of products and services to this diverse customer base.
Avnet's restructuring affects only the Americas and will not be rolled out globally. The Americas market has not been growing as quickly for Avnet as markets such as China, and the distributor says it wants to increase its marketshare.
"You have to touch more customers to fuel growth. If the market isn't growing, the way you increase your marketshare is to increase your customer base," Smith said.
I think the Americas customers have changed the way they want to be serviced. They want the option of dealing with you face to face or call you up or go online. We have to make it as convenient as possible for customers to do business with us. It's pretty simple, really -- we have to touch more customers with more products. Our success will be measured in more customers, more sales, and profitability.
Never understood the overlap in divisions, so the consolidation is overdue. However, I just heard today that the only 2 Avnet salespeople for all of West Michigan were let go. How are you going to reach more customers that way?
FAE is very speciality field. You need to have 10 years of design experience before you become FAE for that product. When you merge product line, how effective will new FAE with no previous knowledge?
While I was in design and development, we used to source many parts through Avnet. Their FAEs were knoweledgable and approachable. Also they always used to get back. I guess Avnet has done and continue to be doing some remarkable business in sourcing.
@Rich,
“Thanks for improving our trade relations with China. It's really paid off!”
I can see the irony. Trading with China and other low labour cost countries is driven by the will of companies to be more competitive and make profits. We just have to accept the consequences.
Hi Douglas: Is there anything holding companies or entire industries back from widespread adoption of the ITAIDE process/tool? It seems to me that if you are a big enough OEM, you can require your downstream partners to participate. Talk about expediting shipment….
The concept of Trusted Vs Untrusted looks good .This looks like a form of ISO certification for Supply chain trust.
Just want to know whether such initiative has been internationally recognized or is it just limited to good coming to USA.
Many a countries have a lot of paper work and clearances required for export also., which means a possible uncertainty in supply chain.
If there is an international treaty on this matter then the international supply chains can have predictable delivery times.
When the shipment gets delayed due to genuine reasons like security processes its understood and well respected. But when its purely because of unnecessary tax issues or paper work it really kills the project delivery time.
Yes strengthening the weakest is the 1st thing which should be done. Then try to strengthen the best ones so no loop holes between those two will be created. That way you will ultimately restrict or atleast minimize upto a greater extent the gap.
@Barbara, Right now this has been just a very highly coordiated experiment with just 4 industries represented along with the government and educational participants. There were actually 5 business sectors, two of which were pharma compaies. The results indicate a very accelerated supply chain with much more security and protections agains fraud or counterfeit, but I think there will be the typical knee-jerk reaction of companies in the US who will interpret this as too much government in their business. The concept of government and other agencies pulling IT data relevant to every shipment, instead of the company have to push the data to multiple organizations, multiple times is an obvious win for speed concerns, but just how open the books need to be will be another prolonged battle that may see an organized, well-funded resistance. The thing about the EU that strikes me over and over again, is that they have the ability to recognize a problem, and the determination and mind-set to investigate solutions ASAP. Wth all of the REACH, RoHS, WEEE implementation, it can be seen as government overreaching, however, the benefits to the consumers of goods and services more than justify the aggressive mandates. Will the US individual companies secure their supply chains by allowing access to key partners? Yes. They already do with EDI, but will they bring the government onboard to the same extent? I think that is a loooong wait and see.
@Prabhakar, I think the US has no will to address this as aggressively as required. It will have to begin at the referendum level and work up the chain with a lot of political jockeying back and forth. The EU will lead again, but IBM was the IT company behind this experiment so they have some clout in DC and may be the pioneering entity that brings this to the fore. Citing the success if this multi-year experiment will help put some credible flesh on these bones.
@nimantha.d, What a concept! Doing a thorough job at both ends of the effort. Who do you think should do this? What players in industry could best effect this in your supply chain family?
@SP. That is correct. I think you have hit upon something that is both fundamental and often times overlooked. If we could re-examine our paperwork phenomena and determine what paper is redundant, unnecessary, or excessive, and reduce the administrative workload significantly by minimizing the paperwork, we might discover economies of improvement that alone wold be well worth the effort. However, because multiple agencies are involved and often duplicates and triplicates of the same documents have to pass through these agencies, which agency is going to cut back their budget by indicating that they really don't need to see the same documents another agency has already looked at and certified.
Douglas: I see why industries would be cautious. I would argue that the government is already involved in all this stuff anyway and it's better to be proactive than reactive. If we wait too long, we might end up with a much more intrusive plan.
@SP: I completely agree. And then after this happens, it doesn't make sense if you still wonder why countries like China are far more superior in innovation and have much smoother supply chains.
@Taimoorz,
“it doesn't make sense if you still wonder why countries like China are far more superior in innovation “
I didn't know that. But I don't think China is that innovative. They do excel in copyning others, though. But that is hardly innovation.
Hospice: Innovation isn't always about new products. It's also about finding newer and cheaper ways of doing existing things. China has been fairly successful with it over the recent years.
Taimoor yes true but it has something NEW included so basically its a new thing after all isnt it ?
Didn't know what Rich was talking about and it made me look into it.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/81b9d8ea-0608-11e2-a28a-00144feabdc0.html
The FT uses “bullies workers”, where the independent blogs use “struck workers” which is the kind of specific description I look for. But their forum entries I'd say are pretty on the mark.
“You need to have 10 years of design experience before you become FAE for that product.”
@_hm: I've never heard this word before. What are the key resposibilities of an FAE?
Taimoor true china is innovative but they cannot implement it without moving with technology which is not happening with chains right now sadly.
What were lessons learned? What was the cause of this exigency and was it not planned?