Rexel USA CEO Roger Little sat down with tED magazine at the end of 2024 to talk about key issues impacting our supply chain. That included the continued use of mergers and acquisitions, workforce development, electrification, and Rexel’s continued commitment to using technology.
In this second part of our four-part series, Little talks about the digital tools Rexel and its customers are using every day.
tED magazine: Let’s talk about customers for a second and again some of the things that that you’re hearing from different levels of management at Rexel USA. In terms of are they changing, what are they looking for. NAED just launched a big initiative, “Where’s My Stuff,” so share some of the feedback you’re getting from your customers in terms of reducing friction.
Roger Little, CEO Rexel USA: Certainly, as we came through COVID and the supply chain challenges which, you know, I don’t think most of us had ever seen, and then certainly delays within certain segments of the supply chain today, it’s not necessarily shortages but also lead times, and the customers are more aware of that than ever. The panic buying and the feeling of warehousing and how disruptive that was to the entire supply chain and obviously to their own financials. Customers are holding that material and warehousing it. That’s not what an electrical contractor or an OEM or machine builder typically is good at. That’s not their job. Their job is to do the trade or the task that they set out to do. One vValue of distribution is clearly in logistics, making sure the materials are there, making sure we have warehouses and distribution centers full of what they’re going to need, and anticipate those demands. We have had much more open conversations than in the past with customers about future demands and making sure that is going to be available.There’s obviously some price uncertainty as we saw some high inflation during COVID. Now we’ve got some conversations about tariffs with the new administration coming in, so there’s a lot of conversation about securing supply, but also what’s the price going to be and what’s it going to look like a year from now. It’s not like they’ve bid the job today get it tomorrow and buy the material the next day. The cycle on some of this is 8, 12, 16 months, even beyond, right now. And then a second piece to that is you want to be as digital and as technologically advanced and capable, and dare I say it, with the use of AI or other products, you want to be as helpful as you can.
tED magazine: But you have to invest in these products, programs, and services to help those customers. Like you were saying, contractors certainly don’t want to warehouse products for 16 months. They want to warehouse it for 16 hours and get it installed and move on. What are you doing to invest in those technology tools to aid the customer, and what’s your commitment to making sure you have the right people in the right places?
Little: First and foremost, understanding what the customers do need and want and then once we have that list, it’s finding the tools, whether they be in house or from a third party that can satisfy that. We have a great digital team, a large digital team, probably never thought I would see a digital team of this size in any organization, and I came out of the digital world. I thought I was pretty digital. We are constantly looking at what’s the next new shiny object that’s being developed. We are looking at what retail is doing, what other segments of distribution are doing, what tools our manufacturers are using, and really making sure we have our eyes on everything because they’re finding a lot of opportunities to reuse technology that other people have created. It works great because of their similarities between our business and their business. And then every day there’s a new company starting up that has the next great idea. We are making sure that we’re abreast of that, talking to whether it be our peers in my case, talking to other countries around the world with Rexel to see what they’re using. It may be a great idea that comes out of Germany or France that we can use here. The digital team is really up out there not just implementing tools of today but figuring out what the next great objects are going to be and making sure we’re ready for it and if our customers want it.
tED magazine: It is amazing to see how many products are coming to market right now. Give me a little bit of your experience with that and I’m not putting words in anybody’s mouth, but there certainly was a time where a lot of people thought technology is going to come in and take people’s jobs. What is your personal experience where you actually have to add teams and people and having the right people in the right positions?
Little: In almost every function within the organization there’s digital tools that can help, so it’s not just finding what will help inside sales or our quotations team do take offs better or send out more complete reports or delivery schedules. It’s really everything from the very back office of the organization to the sales order. So, it really is so many parts of the business touched by this. That’s the amazing part to me. We’ve seen great tools for demand planning on the inventory side. Back in the day, there were these simple algorithms and now the algorithms have gotten very, very sophisticated and they are continuing to be updated almost every day. We’re being forced to do revision changes constantly and sometimes it just happens every night. It’s quite amazing to see that where we used to announce where we’re going to take it down three Monday nights from now to do a change. Now we’re changing systems almost daily and doing the updating. I think that rapid change, making sure that we have tools across the enterprise, whether it’s for the folks collecting money in the organization whether it’s for our inside sales team, and using OCR so retyping orders is not necessary, it’s amazing how many parts of the organization that these tools are touching.
tED magazine: Take me into your day a little bit. I know you’re not standing at every branch and making sure that every dollar is counted. I’m not trying to say that. But how have the digital transformation changed over the past year that you’ve been at Rexel USA. Yes, you are making changes all the time. Where do you see it heading in 2025 as you as you stay more committed to digital properties, digital technology, and the strategies that come with it?
Little: The big trends I’ve seen in the last year are the broad part across the enterprise of Rexel USA. The various places we’re using technology but also the information we require either from our customers or from our vendor partners. As you know, all of this AI and machine learning takes enormous amounts of data, so we have our data, but we also require the inputs from others to help us. Demand planning does nothing if all we know is what we have and we don’t know anything else. Our sales folks are looking at our quotation backlog and seeing what’s in that and scrubbing that data. Those are things we never thought about doing. To be honest, we’d look at the bottom number and if how much we quoted last month was up or down. Those were kind of the KPI’s we used. And now it’s scraping every line of those rotations quotations to see what’s in them, to see what we’re quoting, just to make sure we know what’s coming in the future. Changing trends by our customer, if they’re switching to different technologies within their installation or using different products, in a very short amount of time. And then the way we quote large projects has changed quite rapidly, even in the last six months. There’s some technology that several distributors are using, and it’s really changed the way quotations are done to our largest customers. But it’s also for our day-to-day operations that we used to do very manually and maybe we used the web shop to interact with them. The tools we’re using to interact with those customers today have gotten us much deeper and wider into our customer base and much faster than I ever thought it would. It’s scary to think where it could be in two or three years just because of what’s happened over this one year. Does it plateau or does it just continue to skyrocket like it has? If you look at the rapid pace of building data centers, obviously there are a lot of people placing big bets that it’s going to continue to skyrocket.
tED magazine: One year into the new position, are people asking if this is what you expected?
Little: It’s an easy question for me because, honestly, having been involved in the Canadian organization of Rexel for 29 years, I thought I’d seen everything. Kind of been there, done that. With the existing business through the core electrical distribution, that was the case. But to the conversation we’ve had here today, the rapid changing world of AI and our customers, the use of data, the use of digital, this really accelerated much faster than I thought it would. It impacts our people. Our people struggle sometimes to keep up with it and they are worried digital’s going to take their job. There are still folks out there every day that I wake up worried about. Just convincing them that they don’t need to worry about their job, you’re extremely valuable to us, youthey have intellectual knowledge, product knowledge, customer knowledge, the new machines not going to replace that. Let’s face it: the customers want to talk to people. They don’t want to talk to machines. I don’t see chat bots taking over tomorrow. Will it be down the road? Probably. But I don’t see it tomorrow, and most of the customers I talked to, the first thing they talked about is, “we really like dealing with Bob at your branch in Mesa AZ or wherever it is.” I mean it’s amazing that distribution is still very much a people business, so the tools are great, the digital tools are great, but the people are what makes distribution what it is today.