While I’m not the first woman to be president of the American Supply Association, I am the first woman with the honor of attending the ASA Women in Industry ELEVATE conference as the ASA president —being the first woman to hold the role since the founding of the group in 2014.
With each passing year that the American Supply Association (ASA) Women in Industry Division holds it’s ELEVATE conference, it becomes more and more evident than the strength and representation of women in the PHCP-PVF supply chain is growing — much like the division itself.
At last year’s ASA Strategic Planning Retreat, volunteers discussed the idea of a “product data library” that could be the sole source of manufacturer product data to help enable distributors to compete against online-first, big-box retailers, and other nontraditional competitors.
Company training leaders and trainers come from many backgrounds with varying levels of learning and development experience. While not all have degrees in L&D, they most certainly have a passion for helping others to grow.
Advocacy is one of the pillars of the American Supply Association. When the association was founded more than 50 years ago, the need to advocate on behalf of the industry as a whole with a unified voice was paramount and the need remains today.
The ASA OPR has been regarded as the gold standard in PHCP-PVF distributor benchmarking for more than 40 years and presents more than 130 financial datapoints for wholesalers to compare themselves against the entire industry, firms of similar sales volume, similar product offerings and of similar geographical location.
Respondents to ASA’s monthly sales reported a median sales increase of 18% for January 2023 vs. 2022. This reverses a four-month trend of slowing year-over-year rates of growth.
Last month, the room at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Florida, was brimming with more than 100 volunteers representing multibillion-dollar international companies, regional independent companies, and maybe the lifeblood of the industry, multigenerational family businesses.
Recent survey dives deep into eCommerce channel development and importance of robust product data as a service differentiator.
February 20, 2023
The overall survey queried sectors such as industrial, electrical, safety, HVACR, plumbing, building materials, safety, hardware, chemical and plastics, oil and gas products, JanSan and several others. The survey featured an 85-15 percent split between distributors and manufacturers.