Siltek's restructuring of its supply chain business is designed to help the company respond quickly to the drastic changes that CEO Dave Lello predicts for the distribution industry.
"The distribution industry is on the brink of a large change," believes Lello, "and we want to be able to take advantage of that in a timely manner."
Siltek is currently developing a framework to encourage smaller resellers to Web-enable their businesses. Lello says the framework will allow these resellers to display a storefront, which links to Siltek's inventory. Purchases through the reseller's site will automatically be sent through to Siltek and the fulfilment process will begin.
Lello believes this type of model will enable the channel to compete with the likes of Dell.
Doug Woolley, MD of Workgroup, has been appointed as executive director for the Supply Chain Services group in addition to his current position, and will be responsible for e-commerce initiatives like the reseller Web partnerships.
Colin Flatau, MD of Siltek Distribution Dynamics, is charged with utilising Siltek's size to benefit individual operating units. Sharing skips on international transport is one way the company hopes to lower operating costs for its divisions.
"We need to move to a virtual world," says Lello, "which is quite a mindset change [for the channel]."
He envisages product tracking throughout the distribution and fulfilment channel as being entirely virtual, with stock not necessarily residing in the reseller's warehouses before going to the customer. "The distributor acts as a bank - why repeat this process along the supply chain?" asks Lello.
The new CEO is also putting weight behind the value-add concept for resellers, encouraging his partners and customers to move away from box-dropping as it is quickly becoming unprofitable for both the distributor and the reseller.
Siltek is distancing itself from its IT distributor image and is calling itself a technology distributor. This is mainly due to its interests that fall under the Specialist Distribution banner, such as telecommunications. At present, there is no executive member heading up this division.
Share
