Andrew Harris, chief sales and marketing officer at DCC Technologies.
I have sat in enough industry conversations over the past few years to know that our industry is very good at talking. We talk about digital transformation and disruption. We talk about the future of distribution and what the channel needs to become. And yet, if I am honest with myself, we have spent more time crafting the narrative than actually moving.
I include myself in that. We have had our own moments of spending too long on the thinking and not enough on the doing. But I do believe we are reaching an inflection point, not just for us but for the channel more broadly, where the gap between strategy and execution is starting to cost people.
The South African ICT channel is navigating a genuinely difficult moment. Supply chain volatility, rand fluctuations, rising logistics costs and margin pressure are real. In an environment like this, the temptation is to keep planning, keep refining and keep waiting for the right moment to move.
What I keep hearing from resellers, though, is something far simpler. They want it to be easier to do business. Not easier in some grand structural sense, but practically, day-to-day easier.
Ease of doing business is quietly becoming one of the most important differentiators in distribution. Not price alone, not product range alone, but the actual experience of working with a partner.
I had a conversation recently with a reseller who told me he spends a disproportionate amount of his week chasing confirmations and waiting for quotes. That time is not going into his customers. It is going into administration. The speed at which he can get a price, the simplicity of the procurement process and the ability to place an order late in the evening and trust it will be handled properly matter more than many of us acknowledge. It is a small thing in isolation. But multiply it across every reseller, every week, and you start to understand where the real drag on the channel sits. That is the friction worth solving for.
We have been investing in Engage, our e-commerce platform, precisely because of this. Not to replace the sales relationship, because this industry is still built on human connection and trust, but to give resellers more control over how and when they buy.
Digital tools, when done well, do not weaken relationships. They strengthen them. They free up the conversations we have with partners so they can focus on growth rather than administration.
I often try to think about this from the reseller’s perspective. Running a technology business in South Africa today is not easy. You are managing uncertain pricing, customers who want more for less and a market that keeps changing shape beneath your feet.
What you do not need from your distributor is additional complexity. You need simplicity and speed. You need a partner that has taken the friction out of procurement so that you can spend your energy on building your own business.
Removing obstacles sounds straightforward. In practice it means changing the way you work, not just the way you talk about your work. That is something we think about a lot, and if I am honest, we do not always get right.
The channel that pulls ahead over the next few years will not necessarily be the one with the most sophisticated strategy. It will be the one that made it genuinely easy to work with, that showed up consistently and that earned trust through the small things done well.
I certainly do not have all of this figured out. But I know that the resellers I respect most are not waiting for conditions to improve. They are moving. That is the energy I want to match.
