Yesterday, I was on an 8:00 am Monday morning zoom calls with Industrial Supply Association (ISA) member Precision where Mark Jackmore and I were reviewing the content we are presenting on our webcast this week.
Now, Monday morning 8AM zoom calls can be interesting, as the weekly coffee intake is just starting for everyone on the call, so I was interested to see where the preparation work discussion would take us.
You can stay high-level with a Category Management webcast where you talk theory, structure, and more….but those types of webcasts can be created by Grok, Copilot, Chat GPT, etc. in about 5 minutes today. Mark and his team have worked in the channel for many years with some top players like MSC Industrial, Kimberly Clark, S.P. Richards to name a few companies I saw on their website.
What excited me about the webcast with Mark was the level of detail we decided we are going to dive into with examples this week.
SKU Product Management Best Practices
We are going to share examples of how top manufacturers and distributors are doing more than letting their ERP manage their A,B,C,D, and S product waterfall. Today with tariffs, first cost changes coming in every week, demand fluctuations, and more just letting your system reoder points run without additional data overlays and best practices is well….Dangerous.
Of course, there is no silver bullet for every ISA business that works for everyone, but we are going to share data points and best practices that you can use to find the “right bullet” for your business.
How to build a process and system that has speed
Most of the ISA channel has experienced people who passionately care about their business in their “Buy-Side” seats (Purchasing, Inventory, Category or Product Management, etc.). The challenge is when you are an industrial distributor who has to manage 1-2 Million Product SKUS across North America it’s not the talent that is the issues. You need speed and the ability to quickly and efficiently react to the ever-changing market as fast as possible. I used to feel a decade ago that we could do that by doing some access tables and some great pivot table work. That approach is just not going to allow you to cover as much ground as you need to today.
The more SKU’s that team can manage by building top processes, and data and analytics tools, the more effective your team is…. Your goal as a leader is to maximize your great people’s talents to get them to touch and manage more SKUs than they did last month or last year.
Category and Product Management Scorecards
Having the ability to go 30,000 ft., 15,000 ft. and ground level is crucial for scorecards. The 30,000 ft view would be having the 4-5 metrics and charts for the C-Suite levels leaders (overall performance, movement on major trends, etc.). The 15,000 view is for leaders at the district or region level specific for those leaders to manage their business, and the Ground Level scorecards and tracking at the local branch level, the account manager, inside sales team, etc.
I know that sounds relatively simple, but in my experience as Category Management leader for a few billion-dollar distributors it is much harder to actually build scorecards and tracking to run your business at all levels effectively.
If you have a system, process, and scorecard approach that can give you a report for any level (30,000 ft, 15,000 ft, or ground) you can react quickly to any need and get the information in the hands of your key leaders and stakeholders quickly and efficiently.
This week on Thursday July 17th we will be diving into these tactical topics.
In the Category Management teams I was part of and I have worked closely with over the years, I have seen many variations the area of responsibilities. For example – “Buy Side” and inventory breadth and depth may be handled by operations and purchasing. “Sell Side” pricing might be set by a pricing team that works closely with the buy side and category management team.
In my opinion, there is no one magical path to structure the roles of Category Management teams or duties. There are a lot of ways to structure a team and assign responsibilities to be successful.
So, what is the foundation for success for Category Management?
That answer is simply data and data management, with a process that allows you to access analyzed and act on data with speed.
That data foundation and the ability to access that data quickly and efficiently without building pivot tables and access databases yourself is crucial to success.
The days of “gut feel” experience associates making good decisions without foundation data are diminishing…more and more of your seasoned associates with 30 years of experience are retiring every day. The way to help mitigate the brain drain we are all facing is with data and processes.
On our webinar on July 17, we are going to dive into this process in detail with tactical examples that you can use for your business. If you can not attend live please register to view the recording on your timetable.
I would love to hear your thoughts and comments. As always, we appreciate your support. jgunderson@channelmkt.com
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