by Doug Chandler September 24th, 2009
Graybar Electric, St. Louis, announced a move to expand its presence in the New York and New Jersey markets with the establishment of a full-service logistics center in Carteret, N.J., that will serve as the company’s primary shipping hub for customers in those states.
“In addition to the new logistics center, Graybar plans to move its sales, service and administrative employees into new offices: one in Nassau County, N.Y. and another in Middlesex County, N.J. The logistics center and both offices are expected to open by year-end.”
Graybar announcement
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by Doug Chandler September 24th, 2009
IDEA today officially released a much-awaited schema for exchanging fully attributed product data throughout the electrical products channel. The schema gives manufacturers a detailed format for providing up to 27 fields of specifications and descriptors for their products — 26 of them standardized, plus one manufacturer-definable field for describing what makes their product unique.
The schema will help electrical product manufacturers give their distributors the detailed information they need to make e-commerce catalogs and web storefronts more easily searchable.
The schema has been submitted for copyright and is owned by IDEA, but is intended as an industrywide standard. A table of standard abbreviations for industry terms is included and has been copyrighted separately, and contractor and installer groups have already begun adopting the abbreviations, said Mary Shaw, IDEA’s director of standards.
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by Doug Chandler September 24th, 2009
Rockwell Automation and Graybar Electric were presented the 2009 Richard Buzun Award for Leadership and Innovation in eCommerce today. The award honors the late Richard Buzun, IDEA’s second chairman and president of Siemens Energy and Automation, by recognizing one distributor and one manufacturer that continually reach the highest standards of eCommerce.
The awards were presented by Joe Wallace, data and pricing administration manager for Van Meter, and Mark Richards, director of eCommerce for Leviton.
Note: an earlier version of this post mistakenly reported that Van Meter and Leviton, the presenters, had won the award. EM regrets the error.
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by Doug Chandler September 24th, 2009
A new standard for utility meter upgradeability has become the first new standard aimed at supporting development of a nationwide smart grid, said the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) today.
Developed and approved in just 90 days, the standard, SG-AMI 1-2009 Requirements for Smart Meter Upgradeability provides guidance to utilities, state commissions, and others that want to deploy advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) prior to completion of the standards work identified in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Smart Grid Interoperability Roadmap.
NEMA release
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