Infor Acquires Lawson Software

Over the past few months rumors have circulated that Infor was looking for the best fit software company to acquire to complement its business. Infor has over 75,000 customers in a number of verticals ranging from distribution to healthcare, automotive to manufacturing. Finally comes word of an agreement for Lawson to be acquired by Golden Gate Capital (GGC Software Holdings, Inc.) and Infor for a deal valued at $2 billion. Click here to read the press release.

The fit for Infor and Lawson is that they both have worldwide user bases that generate huge cash flow streams. Lawson bring to the new partnership a CLOUD offering for internal and external applications. The External offering enables companies to test the Cloud concept before considering a more extensive offering such as Amazon EC2. The Internal Cloud offering offers the business user the opportunity to consolidate their IT infrastructure, while reducing their costs and reallocating IT staff to more strategic activities. To read more about this offering click here.

Within a very short space of time, the electrical industry has witnessed a couple of high profile companies be either rolled up (Activant being purchased and emerging as Epicor) or making an acquisition (Infor along with a Venture Capital company acquiring Lason).

The question becomes, what does this mean to electrical distributors? Will these companies continue to focus and allocate resources to improving their systems? Will customer support be strengthened? Will new products be offered and the systems be more robust? Or will the companies be more financially driven to enable returns to their shareholders?

While we wish each company the very best, what do you think the affect will be if you own an Activant product (P-21, Trade Service Systems Array, Eclipse or Eagle) or an Epicor product or a Lawson product or an Infor SXE or SXA+?

And how does a Cloud offering affect your approach to your ERP needs? Do you foresee yourself considering a Cloud offering in the next 3-5 years?

Frequent Communications Drive Sales, and E-Marketing Generates Awareness

Ran across a couple of things today that caught the eye....over 30 manufacturers are involved in ElectricSmart's e-Cat launch (including some surprising names), ABB used a convention specific blog and did you know that good sales and marketing requires 14 times?

And now the specifics:

• ElectricSmart is launching its SmarteCat product on Saturday night at the NAED Leadership Summit.  The catalog has over 30 manufacturers in the initial launch.  Some of the participating manufacturers are Rockwell Automation, Schneiddr Electric, GE Energy, GE Lighting, Lutron, IDEAL, Ronk, Shat-R-Shield, Thomas & Betts and Philips / Advance.  An impressive array.  The service looks interesting, and if someone signs up for a Premium account, they can have access to pricing. Can easily print or email specific pages to customers (or to self).  And it's neat how there are featured videos embedded into catalogs. The tour is a nice feature.

What this shows is that manufacturers are convinced that more and more customers (end-users and contractors) are looking for information on the web.  I don't know the pricing, but if it is inexpensive enough, could envision manufacturers using this as another document repository to reach more customers.

• ABB held their Automation & Power World Conference last week in Orlando.  Impressive show with over 5000 attendees.  They blogged from the show, sharing important information from various speakers.  Nice way to communicate to various audiences. With the growth in social marketing, this is the tip of the iceberg in how manufacturers, or distributors, can extend the reach of a face-to-face meeting to enable non-attendees to gain value.
• Reportedly 14 is the magic number, as in the number of times you should contact an "inactive" customer to capture some awareness from them. While no salesperson wants to call on a customer 14 times to hear "no, we don't need anything", marketing can play a big role in developing an "interactive sales and marketing engagement strategy".  Marketing has the ability to be an "alternative sales person", helping maintain relationships, share information and eventually generate revenue. This article states 14, I've also seen 18, but the point of the matter is "frequency of communication captures mindshare, mindshare captures marketshare." Do you have an integrated sales and marketing engagement strategy? Do you believe that non-sales engagement can generate sales?

Do you communicate 14 times to underperforming customers? Are you actively marketing via "e"? Should distributors market via "e" or is this a manufacturer's way of going around the channel? Or are they defending their brand in support of the channel?

Gas Beyond $4.00. Impact on Your Business?

I was returning from a meeting with a client this morning and needed to put gas in the rental before the return.  While gas has been creeping up, today was the first time I paid $4.00 per gallon (and yes, I know that there are 5 states that are averaging over $4.00 for regular unleaded).


As we know from the last couple of times that there were gas spikes, typically distributors start to think of how they can reduce costs, shift costs or increase revenues (margins, fees) to minimize the incremental expense, especially with the concurrent erosion in margin over the years (and other increasing operational costs).


This time, while we've heard some comments, there haven't been many nor are we hearing of many distributor surcharges, service revisions, minimum orders requirements, etc.  Is it that we've become used to the increases, the pain isn't enough, you don't think anything can be done because you don't think your competitor will make a change, or we feel this is just the "cost of doing business"?

In 2008 and late 2005 we conducted distributor surveys to ascertain how distributors are responding to soaring fuel costs (click here for some of our 2005 findings).  Should we do it again?

What are you doing with $4.00 unleaded regular gas (and expected to go higher for the summer) and more for diesel?  Will this eventually change an industry business model? What happens if we see $5.00? $6.00? Are manufacturer minimums increasing? Are your's?