Electrical Marketing's LiveWire

Despite the down economy, the NAED Western Conference in San Diego this week drew an estimated 175 distributor attendees from 68 electrical supply houses and 25 independent manufacturers’ reps from 11 firms covering the Western region. The conference seemed bigger than the past few NAED Western meetings and the general mood of attendees was pretty optimistic. Two of the seminars at the meeting drew particularly good crowds – “Capitalizing on Distributor Capabilities in Energy Markets” by Fred Paris, Paris Consulting Associates, Plymouth, Mass., and “How to Position Yourself as an Energy Expert” by Jerry Yudelson, Yudelson Associates ,Tucson, Ariz.

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.

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.

Bob Gaylord, president of IDEA, in his opening general session comments to the E-Biz Forum in Tucson today, ran through several initiatives the organization is introducing that will make it easier for manufacturers and distributors to keep data in the Industry Data Warehouse (IDW) fresh.

Among these, a new “utilities work station” interface where manufacturers can make line-item changes to their product data, which will go live in the next 30 days; a new IDEA “portal 2.0″ for users in all parts of the chain that will go live October 5; and a standardized web ordering platform for distributor web storefronts that automatically populates with IDW data (in six languages) that will be available by the end of the year.

Gaylord also said UNSPSC codes on every product item in the IDW will become mandatory in December.

The IDEA’s E-Biz Forum in Tucson this week is lightly attended compared to past years, but attendees are enthusiastic about pressing forward on their efforts to synchronize the flow of data between manufacturers, distributors and reps. IDEA Director of Sales and Marketing Rita Hagopian attributed the lighter turnout to the economy and the lack of direct flights from most of the country. Nonetheless, the electrical industry geeks gathering in the desert have a full slate of sharply focused meetings ahead — enough that your correspondent is looking for ways to clone himself to attend simultaneous sessions.

Electrical Marketing’s LiveWire will bring you updates throughout the conference, so check back or follow us on Twitter @electricalmktg.