Electrical Marketing's LiveWire

Graybar Electric Co., St. Louis, has joined more than 100 other electrical distributors in feeding out-the-door sales information to the industry-sanctioned Vista data warehouse. Established through a marketing partnership between Epicor and the National Association of Electrical Distributors (NAED), the Vista solution produces category sales reports.
“Graybar is committed to the security of our business information. At the same time, we recognize the value of collaborating with our peers to strengthen our entire industry,” said Robert A. Reynolds, chairman, president and CEO of Graybar. “Working with Epicor, we can protect the confidentiality of our data while leveraging the collective intelligence that can improve our industry as a whole.”
In addition to the electrical supply industry, Epicor Vista Information Services provides accurate, sales tracking, brand and category share, and other information to businesses in the independent hardware, lumber, home center, mass merchandiser, automotive aftermarket, and specialty retail industries. “By relying on Vista market intelligence, distributors and other businesses are eliminating the guesswork that often results in excess stock sitting on the shelf or in sales lost due to a lack of inventory,” said Rick Stanits, national sales manager, Vista Information Services for Epicor. “This is, above all, a business growth tool for the entire electrical distribution industry.”
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Couldn’t resist borrowing this graphic from a presentation entitled “A Lighting Designer’s LED Wish List” that Barbara Horton, president of Horton, Lees Brogden Lighting Design, New York, gave at the DOE’s recent SSL Transformations in Lighting Workshop, held January 31–February 2 in Atlanta. Enjoy and have a great weekend!

With the February chill still in the air, David Gordon of Channel Marketing Group, on his Electrical Trends blog, takes a shot at predicting Electrical Wholesaling’s movers and shakers for the year (headline says 2013, but we assume he meant 2012 … then again David’s always been a forward thinker). He picks some good candidates – IMARK’s expansion with the addition of Crescent Electric and Power & Telephone Supply, and ABB’s growth in North America with its acquisition Thomas & Betts last month (and Baldor last year). Will it be the Year of Acquisitions? Time will tell.

The U.S. Department of Energy, as part of its focus on the solid-state lighting market, released the first report in a three-part series on measuring the full life-cycle costs of various lighting technologies for screw-base lamp applications.

The first report on this study, Review of the Life-Cycle Energy Consumption of Incandescent, Compact Fluorescent, and LED Lamps (PDF), is “based on existing life-cycle assessment literature of lighting products (including academic publications as well as manufacturer and independent research reports) and looks at three life-cycle phases – manufacturing, transportation (from factory to retailer), and use – comparing the energy consumed and considering how that consumption might change in the future for LED lamps,” says DOE in its release announcing the report.

“The second part of the project should be completed this summer and involves a life-cycle environmental analysis of the direct and indirect material and process inputs to make the LED products. The third and final part of the life-cycle effort, which is expected to be finished by October, involves taking the products apart and chemically testing them using existing testing standards, to determine what materials they contain, and in what concentrations. A final report will combine the results of all three analyses to provide a basis for comparing the full environmental tradeoffs between LED and conventional lighting sources.”

Maxlite (West Caldwell, N.J.): Douglas Kruse has been appointed South Central region sales manager and will work closely with MaxLite’s sales agencies to develop LED marketing programs and other energy-efficient lighting programs for architects, designers, lighting distributors and specifiers in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Mississippi. His professional experience includes serving as Southern Central sales rep for Progress Lighting (most recently), as well as the district sales rep (to Home Depot) for Hunter Ceiling Fan Co.

In an earnings call transcript published today for Encore Wire Corp., McKinney, Texas, at www.seekingalpha.com, Daniel Jones, Encore Wire’s president and CEO, said the company had strong quarterly earnings in a turbulent economy despite the “severe recession currently taking place in the construction industry.”
While Jones also said in the call that business conditions were mixed in different regions across the United States, overall he had a positive outlook. He said business conditions in the Pacific Northwest were good, that “West Coast California, Southern Cal, Northern Cal are okay,” and that the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida are “pretty good.” “The Northeast is good, and in Texas I don’t know that we saw as big a dip as anyone else in construction activity, but we seem to be a little insulated from the bottoms,” he added. “Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico are still going along pretty well.
“But just in general the feel is, we are a lot busier. Activity level in the sales office is up, but that’s a combination of we are requiring a little bit more information in trying to get a little bit quicker in the process. But overall there are some pretty nice projects out there; it just takes a little harder work to win those.”
Encore Wire press release on earnings