Let’s start with two quotes from great thinkers from different and definitely not distribution backgrounds.      "A favorite theory of mine is that no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before…"                  Mark Twain   “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”              Winston Churchill   There are no history books for those of us in the Knowledge-based distribution world.  While I consider myself to be a history buff, I am certainly not an official historian.  But, to quote the popular commercial, I did spend the night in a Holiday Inn Express.  Probably more than a thousand nights in various hotel rooms while earning a living in the distributor business.  So here is my attempt at writing history.  ...

www.inddist.com I just had the opportunity to review Industrial Distribution Magazine’s annual survey .  This year they focused on distributor value and quite frankly, I am not shocked by the results.  I am, however, deeply disappointed.  The survey question asked “Which are the primary reasons your customers do business with you?”  The respondents reported the following reasons: 85.17% Relationship 74.16% Product Availability 68.42% Technical Support 62.20% Delivery Time 50.72% Price 31.10% Engineering Capabilities 30.62% Vendor Managed Inventory 28.23% 24x7 Support 3.35%    Other This was the 69 th edition of this survey; meaning the very first edition fell well before my father started in the distribution business back in the 50s.  Silly me, but somehow I imagined our industry had progressed. With a couple exceptions, the results look like something straight out of 1965.   I am disenchan...