Welding & Gases Today Q2 2016

Second FirstQuarter Quarter2016 2016

PREVENTING INVENTORY

PROFILE: COMPRESSED GAS SOLUTIONS

EVAPORATION

WHAT’S WORKING IN WAREHOUSING ‘QUALIFIED FACILITY’ QUESTIONS

SMC EXHIBITORS GUIDE

MEET YOUR SMC SPEAKERS

The Official Journal of the Gases and Welding Distributors Association

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Contents Second Quarter • Spring 2016 • Volume 15, No. 2

F E AT U R E S MEMBER PROFILE 14 Gas Is Our Middle Name

D E PA R T M E N T S PRESIDENT’S PERSPECTIVE 7

Lots Done; Lots More to Do

By William Visintainer

The flow experts at Compressed Gas Solutions are passionate about gas and customers.

By Carole Jesiolowski

HERE’S WHAT’S APP-ENING 52 Ten Great Technology Helpers

These technology aids let you work on the fly, in faster and easier ways and add fun and information to travel and leisure time.

DIRECTOR’S DESK 11 Good News: GAWDA is Healthy and Growing

ROAD-TRIPPIN’ TO THE REGIONALS 110 GAWDA’s Regional Meeting Schedule

By John Ospina

Look for an interesting road trip or two!

EDITOR’S NOTES 13 First Impressions: Getting to Know GAWDA

By Diane Stirling

BEST PRACTICES SMC Presenter

CONSULTANT CORNER 21 GAWDA Safety Committee: Sample Safety Practices

By Michael Dodd

23 T he Two Critical Questions For Your Food Compliance

By Thomas L. Badstubner

26 DOT Proposes New Safety Fitness Standards

By Richard P. Schweitzer, Esq.

SMC Presenter

By Dirk Beveridge

88 The High Value of Experiential Training ‘Vivid’ learning experiences help people retain lessons—and help businesses retain employees.

SMC Presenter

91 My Plate Glass Window Perspective

A glimpse into corporate reputation management strategies.

By Marjorie Young

ON THE EDGE SMC Presenter

94 Dealing With Disruption: We’ve ‘Been There, Done That’

GAWDA members have faced and dealt with disruptive forces in the industry for many decades.

By Ken Thompson

104 Today’s Market Advantages: Made from Innovation

By Wayne Twardokus

107 Overcapacity and Its Impact in SMC the Global Presenter Marketplace

By David Manthey

SMC Presenter

96 Another Gut Check on the Question, ‘Why Are We Still Here’?

It’s time to re-ask the question, re-assess our paranoia, and continue this great conversation.

By Jim Earlbeck

HUMAN RESOURCES SMC Presenter

99 Learning With Generation Next

Why it’s well worth working through generational on-the-job style differences.

By George Ratermann

SALES/MARKETING

By Thomas DeCarlo, Ph.D.

Three truths guide your leadership of change and innovation.

By Steven B. Wiley

MONEY MATTERS

82 Understanding Your Customers

85 The Age of Disruption - A Call for Innovation

SMC Presenter

101 Need a New Crop of Employees?

You May Have to ‘Grow You Own’

Industry-academic alliances may help solve the current, and coming, human capital gap.

By Dr. Norm Clark

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Spring 2016

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Contents Second Quarter • Spring 2016 • Volume 15, No. 2

D E PA R T M E N T S 109 In Memoriam

COVER STORY 28 What’s Working In Warehousing

What’s out back in the warehouse is so much more than just boxes of product to sell and rows of cylinders to fill. The next big thing in the welding and gases distribution industry is as close as the space where inventory is stored – because of its potential to create new business opportunity, competition and growth.

44 Preventing Inventory Evaporation

112 Welcome New Members

These practical illustrations hit home, and can help you convince employees that inventory accuracy is important – to the company, and to them, too.

113 Industry News

By Jon Schreibfeder

117 Mergers & Acquisitions 118 New Products, Services & Technologies 118 Industry Calendar

Second Quarter 2016

PREVENTING INVENTORY

EVAPORATION

50 The Warehouse Manager Makes it Great – Or Not Communication styles impact every area in your organization, and the warehouse is no exception. This is why employee engagement is the key to what your customers value most.

PROFILE: COMPRESSED GAS SOLUTIONS

WHAT’S WORKING IN WAREHOUSING ‘QUALIFIED FACILITY’ QUESTIONS

SM C

EXHI BITO RS GUID E The Official Journal

of the Gases and

MEET YOUR SMC SPEAKERS Welding Distribu tors Association

By Jim Ambrose

120 Advertisers Index

ON THE WEB

SPRING MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE

FOLLOW WELDING & GASES TODAY ON

57 Disruption + GAWDA Event = Opportunity www.WeldingAndGasesToday.org

Distributors and suppliers share take-aways that made a difference.

By Carole Jesiolowski

60 SMC Event Schedule

A new prize program and expanded exhibitor space highlight the 2016 SMC.

THE TEAM

65 Get to Know Your SMC Speakers

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

68 SMC Exhibitor Pages

John Ospina

SENIOR EDITORS Diane Stirling Charles McChesney

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Carole Jesiolowski Natasha Alexis

DESIGN Robin Turk

Welding & Gases Today (USPS 22-975) is published quarterly: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall, with additional publications in Spring and Summer. • Non-member subscription rate is $195 per year. • GAWDA members (key contacts and branch locations) receive the magazine as part of their dues. • GAWDA members can order additional yearly subscriptions (4 issues) for $40. • Welding & Gases Today is published by Data Key Communications, Inc. on behalf of the Gases and Welding Distributors Association. • Periodicals postage paid at Pembroke Pines, FL, and at additional mailing offices (ISSN 1558-5344). • Editorial correspondence should be sent to: Editors, c/o editor@WeldingAndGasesToday.org • Advertising correspondence and materials should be sent to William Brod, Data Key Communications, Inc., 1415 W. Genesee Street, Syracuse, NY 13204; telephone (315) 445-2347 fax (315) 422-1721. • Postmaster: Send address changes to Welding & Gases Today, Gases and Welding Distributors Association, One Oakwood Blvd, Suite 195, Hollywood, FL 33020 • Welding & Gases Today is the official journal of the Gases and Welding Distributors Association (GAWDA) and carries news and announcements concerning GAWDA. • It is not responsible for contents or opinions other than association activities. • Contents are copyright © 2016 Data Key Communications, Inc. • All rights reserved. • Nothing may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher. • Questions and comments can be sent via e-mail to editor@WeldingAnd GasesToday.org. • Data Key Communications, Inc. reserves the right to print portions of or all of any correspondence mailed to the editors without liability on its part and no such correspondence will be returned. • Visit Welding & Gases Today online at www.WeldingAndGasesToday.org.

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President’s Perspective

At the Halfway Mark, Lots Done, Lots Still to Do! by william visintainer

I

t is hard to believe that it has been six months since we met at the Annual Convention in Phoenix, Arizona. Over these months, the Board, Committees and GAWDA staff have been hard at work putting together and implementing Objectives, Goals and Meetings for 2016.

In December, the Executive Committee met at Association Headquarters to develop the 2016 annual plan. The first step in the process was to understand the current state of the association; we used a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis. Once each of these four elements were identified, the goal was to leverage the Strengths, improve the Weaknesses, exploit the Opportunities and mitigate the Threats.

Our association membership comprises many different and unique constituencies, which added complexity to our analysis.

The next step was to identify annual goals and objectives that targeted our findings and those that would be relevant to a majority of our members, regardless of membership type and/or size.

SMC2016 Contact Booth Program: A new floor design will promote greater traffic to all booths, and we will be awarding more than $10,000 in gifts and prizes.

Finally, the goals, objectives and due dates were delegated to and accepted by the Executive Committee and GAWDA staff. The total process is far too much for this column, but as an example, the following are goals, objectives and due dates for the GAWDA “Operations” function.

• Investigate, select and implement a cost-effective, consistent and efficient registration system to be used for Regionals, Spring Management Conferences and Annual Conventions— Complete by 5/15/2016.

• Begin tracking, reporting and posting all registration errors/issues and categorize by type beginning with Scottsdale Annual Convention (2015) – Initiate first report by 4/11/2016.

• Improve Meeting Survey/Feedback Forms and merge into a new Post-Meeting Recap.

Currently lots of data, but not much ‘actionable’ information. Going forward, we will use the Surveys/Feedback and Post-Meeting Recaps to improve subsequent meetings – Initiate Meeting Recap (including attendance

by Member type and size) by 5/5/2016.

• Survey Members not attending SMC and Annual Convention and report, track and publish on an ongoing basis – Complete within four weeks following meeting.

The Executive Committee and I will discuss all 2016 goals and objectives in April in Savannah.

We intend for this to become an annual process that will improve our association by providing year-to-year continuity, accountability, communication and relevancy.

Also, in an effort to better understand and deliver each Member’s definition of GAWDA

Spring 2016

2015-16 GAWDA President W.A. Visintainer is president of Atlas Welding Supply Co. in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and online at www.atlaswsco. com. He can be reached at BVisintainer@atlaswsco. com and at 205-345-6903.

7

President’s Perspective value, we have worked with The University of Alabama at Birmingham’s School of Industrial Distribution to put together a Membership Satisfaction Survey. If you have not already received the survey, it will be arriving soon. Please help us do a better job of meeting your needs and improving the value of our Association by completing the survey and returning it promptly. The Dean of UAB’s School of Industrial Distribution, Dr. Thomas DeCarlo, will be sharing the survey results at the Spring Management Conference in Savannah.

Speaking of the SMC in Savannah, a new floor design for

Our supplier members contribute a significant portion of our annual revenue and we really need to support their efforts with great attendance and a high level of networking at the Contact Booth Program.

the Contact Booth Program has been developed to promote greater traffic to all booths. We will also be providing raffle tickets to vendors to hand out to distributors who visit their booths. At the conclusion of the Booth Program, we will be raffling more than $10,000 in gifts and prizes; you must be in attendance to win. Our supplier members contribute a significant portion of our annual revenue and we really need to support their efforts with great attendance and a high level of networking at the Contact Booth Program.

The business sessions for the SMC will focus on identifying and dealing with the business, market and cultural disruptions that we face every day in our businesses. We have lined up some excellent speakers and we have charged them with providing significant “take-home value.” Lastly, we will be showcasing an online customer satisfaction survey, with post-survey analytics, that is now available to all members as part of your annual dues.

Thank you for being part of GAWDA. Hope to see you in Savannah.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

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Director’s Desk

Here’s the Good News: GAWDA is Healthy and Growing Membership Committee and Staff efforts have boosted our numbers by john ospina

O

ur association continues to remain healthy and is growing. In 2015, we closed the year at 548 members. This is an eight percent increase in our total membership numbers over the past year. For several years our total membership numbers have stayed right around 500. As companies have continued to be consolidated, we’ve been able to offset the loss of prior members by adding new member companies, however getting ahead of this curve has proven difficult.

In 2015 we were able to step up our efforts and stay ahead of the consolidation curve. The Membership Services Committee, which was chaired by Abydee Butler of Butler Gas, played a key role in identifying prospect opportunities that directly impacted the Association’s overall membership growth. Abydee has since taken a position on the GAWDA Board of Directors, and has passed the Membership Committee torch to Melissa Perkins, of Electronic Fluorocarbons, LLC, and Steve Dodge, of Flame Technologies.

This year, we started the first quarter with 11 new members and a renewal retention rate in the mid 90 percent. Our goal is to grow our membership and continue the trend that was started last year. To realize this, several initiatives have been put into place.

President Visintainer has rallied several key volunteer members and put together a Social Media Advisory Board. This advisory board is chaired by Melissa Perkins, who has shown great skill in organizing our various social media platforms. Melissa, along with her fellow advisory volunteers and GAWDA Media, have opened

the flow of communication. You can join in and follow the various conversations by clicking on the social media icons at the bottom of the GAWDA.org web pages.

The Member Services Committee and GAWDA staff continue to hone in member prospects through industry publications, buying groups, sister associations and exhibit opportunities. Many prospects also come directly from our association members, who see the value of being part of GAWDA and refer their friends to GAWDA. To continue to foster this behavior and recognize such members, GAWDA will be establishing a member referral program. Referring members will be tracked and recognized at our SMC and annual meetings. With your help, we can continue to grow our association, increase our networking group and strengthen our industry.

John Ospina is GAWDA’s executive director. He can be reached at GAWDA Headquarters in Hollywood, Florida, via telephone at 844-251-3219 or via email at jospina@gawda.org.

GETTING READY FOR THIS YEAR’S DIRECTORIES

We also are finalizing the annual membership directory data for this year’s book. Stephen Hill has been reaching out to all of our Member Directory contacts to get their listing updates.

If you missed this process, please take a look at your listing in last year’s directory and send any updates you have to Stephen as soon as possible at shill@gawda.org.

GAWDA Media also will be reaching out to our supplier members to get their updates for this year’s Buyer’s Guide, which will be published right after the Member Directory.

As always, thank you for your continued support of GAWDA and our industry.

Spring 2016

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Editor’s Notes

First Impressions Getting to Know GAWDA – and a Great Industry by diane stirling

A

mong the “first-timers” at this year’s G AW D A S p r i n g M a n a g e m e n t Conference are five new team members of GAWDA Media: Publisher Bill Brod, Relationship Manager Tim Hudson, Graphic Designer Robin Turk and Senior Editors Charles McChesney and me.

We’ll be among the “fresh faces” at the welcome reception, in the seats at conference sessions, and walking the Contact Booth Program to get better acquainted with GAWDA Members.

One of the first things we were told about this industry is that this is a wonderful business filled with great people. It’s a truth we quickly discovered for ourselves. GAWDA members exhibit an earnest, welcoming and helpful nature.

We’ve spoken with nearly 300 of them so far. We are delighted by their willingness to give us their time and attention, and have appreciated a cordial embrace and an outpouring of interest, patience and collegiality. Our onboarding period has been assisted by the staff at GAWDA Headquarters and by industry veterans, former publisher Judy Flanagan and former managing editor Carole Jesiolowski, as well as many member businesses.

We’re grateful to everyone who has shown us the ropes, answered our questions and afforded us their expertise as we’ve undertaken GAWDA Media’s day-to-day operations.

On that note, we hope you enjoy the range of articles and authors in this issue. “What’s Working in Warehousing,” reports on how several GAWDA distributors and suppliers approached updating and building new spaces, and checks in on warehousing trends. There’s a new technology-focused feature (“Here’s What’s App-ening”)

that we hope you’ll find fun and informative. And guest authors, Texas A & M’s Dr. Norm Clark and GAWDA Member George Ratermann, offer insights about young people in the workplace and how to attract them to and help them succeed in welding-and-gases careers.

We look forward to your feedback. We’re hoping to meet many of you in Savannah to learn about your company, gather your news, and hear your ideas for stories that will help you achieve your business and Association goals. We’re here to do all we can through GAWDA’s print and online publications to promote the Association and to help member businesses thrive.

So when you’re at the SMC, please look us up! When you see Bill, Tim, Charles, Robin and me, tap us on the shoulder, say hello, and start a conversation. Even if you’re not there this time, take a few minutes to give us a call. We’d love to hear from you.

Diane Stirling is a senior editor at Welding and Gases Today.

A career journalist, public relations practitioner, communications strategist and web/ social media content creator, she is part of the GAWDA Media team. Get in touch with her at dianes@datakey. org and 315-445-2347.

Top l-r: Tim Hudson, Bill Brod, Charles McChesney; Seated l-r: Robin Turk, Diane Stirling

Spring 2016

13

GAWDA Member Profile

Gas Is Our Middle Name The flow experts at Compressed Gas Solutions are passionate about gas and customers by carole jesiolowski, contributing editor

W

hat happens when you put together two generations of seasoned distributors; road-tested skillsets from the majors and independents and their suppliers; two owners with CDL certification ready to jump in on a dime; an enormous amount of confidence and faith in their abilities; a fully operating fill plant; and a location not far from Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida?

Bob Leaman and Bob Fine are the first to say that there is no magic in the success of Compressed Gas Solutions. They are quick to say they are having great fun serving their customers and that bringing new technologies to their marketplace in Central Florida has been a major factor in that success.

It’s been 14 years now since Bob Leaman and Bob Fine launched Compressed Gas Solutions (CGS), but their history together dates back almost 35 years. Bob Leaman’s first job in the industry was at a distributorship, where he worked first in accounting and then in sales. He was next recruited by a cryogenic vessel supplier to serve as their national sales manager.

This exposure led to a joint venture in Fort Myers, Florida, and eventually his first distributorship, Weldarc Inc., in 1982.

Bob Fine was employed as Weldarc Inc.’s general manager until Leaman sold the business in 1995. Fine went on to work for two national gas and welding distributorships, serving as northern sales manager for one and corporate vice president for the other. Supervising more than 100 employees and 30 stores, Fine looks back on this time: “I had the focus of a small independent while working at these two companies and tried to figure out how I could change them. I wanted to serve external customers, and they spend their time serving internal customers. What I quickly discovered was that they didn’t want to be changed.”

In the early part of the 2000s, Leaman was itching to get back into the industry, and the two started talking. “I missed the business,” says Leaman. “I met Bob Fine for lunch one day and said, “Let’s do it again.” This time around, Leaman and Fine saw an opportunity to differentiate themselves in the Central Florida market.

CGS President Bob Leaman and Vice President Bob Fine lead a team of 19 employees, including second-generation Dean Leaman and Mike and Tom Fine. Both men hold CDL licenses and do the heavy lifting when needed.

Bob Leaman (left) fills the oxygen orca; Bob Fine (above) fills the argon orca.

14

Spring 2016

Member Profile: Compressed Gas Solutions

Located in Orlando, Florida, Compressed Gas Solutions serves customers throughout Central Florida and welcomes walk-ins to its newly designed showroom.

Within three months, Leaman and Fine developed a business plan, leased a building and opened for business, complete with a fully functioning gas plant and an eye on microbulk applications. Fine explains, “We were confident and had enough faith in our ability to make this work. On the day we turned the key and said we’re open for business, we had in place 1,500-gallon oxygen, argon and nitrogen tanks, brand new high-pressure cylinders and fully functional pumping capabilities.” Leaman adds, “We wanted to put ourselves in the best cost position for our customers and for ourselves. Plus, the odds of being disappointed are high if you have to rely on someone else.”

Currently, medical, industrial, analytical and specialty gases account for 80 percent of CGS’s total sales. Bulk tanks include 6,000- and 1,500-gallon argon bulk tanks, 3,000- and 1,500-gallon oxygen tanks, a 1,500-gallon nitrogen tank, and a 10-ton CO2 receiver.

MARKETPLACE DIFFERENTIATORS

Compressed Gas Solutions is always on the lookout for ways to differentiate itself. Based on the foundation of providing excellent customer service, the CGS team has strong ideas on the best ways to stand out.

Pointing to a national retail chain that provides everything from garden supplies to groceries, to household goods and power tools, Leaman indicates that while these stores have most everything a customer needs, there is typically no one available to help the customer find it. “All of us have become accustomed to poor service in our retail shopping,” he says, Spring 2016

a scenario that will never happen at CGS, whose philosophy is: Order it today, get it tomorrow, same day when possible.

A fleet of nine trucks, including four for microbulk, make just-in-time deliveries happen, as does a team of 19 employees who share a passion for the work they do and a desire to bring exceptional service to customers.

While the industry has not changed that much, taking full advantage of available technology has established CGS as a market leader. To improve customer service, every CGS truck contains a handheld computer and a ticket printer, virtually eliminating paper delivery tickets. The entire cylinder population is tracked by barcode as it travels from the fill plant to the truck, to the customer and back. Microbulk tanks contain a telemetry package and two employees are dedicated to monitoring customer tanks, allowing for the promotion of just-in-time deliveries, 24/7.

“Responding to customers’ needs is what we do best,” says Leaman, who points out that some customers deal with a vendor so long as they don’t recognize they are getting bad service. “We ask customers to give us the opportunity to prove that we can do it better.”

CGS maintains a large base of customers, including hospitals, medical laboratories, fabrication shops, laser-cutting facilities, environmental labs, as well as the small, various businesses that support the major industries throughout Central Florida.

Marketing efforts include custom brochures for a variety of niche markets, such as dental offices, veterinary clinics, fab shops and testing laboratories. For example, a brochure targeted 15

Member Profile: Compressed Gas Solutions

Inside Sales and Customer Service Representative Eliam Cohen is ready for customers at the cylinder dock area.

at medical gas customers describes the highest quality medical grade gases, 24/7 customer service and delivery, and the availability of emergency oxygen units. “Let Compressed Gas Solutions take care of the gas so you can take care of your patients,” the brochure reads. These specific, targeted marketing approaches include pictures of the appropriate cylinders and products and have proven to be very successful in attracting new customers.

THE FLOW EXPERTS

CGS specializes in custom-engineered, turnkey gas-delivery systems, including manifolds, piping and use point regulation and connection. Leaman points out that gas-supply systems involve a lot more than selecting parts in a catalog. “We understand flow and pressure requirements. While the vast majority of our competitors sell on price, we work diligently to ensure a system design and installation capable of delivering what the customer needs.”

To design an installation that meets the customer’s current needs and future plans, no stone is left unturned. This is where the experience of the flow experts comes in. Fine explains, “Our main question is: What will get the job done in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.” Most of CGS’s flow experts have over 25 years of experience, which Fine calls the company’s biggest advantage. Developing customer trust and providing solutions that improve safety, productivity and labor costs is what CGS does best.

In addition to design and installation, repairs, service and maintenance, CGS also provides customers with training on everything from government regulations and piping issues Spring 2016

to safety and handling. “Many customers use gas every day without knowing how or why it works,” Fine says.

INTRODUCTION OF MICROBULK

CGS views microbulk as a tremendous opportunity. When the company was first established, microbulk tanks ranging from 300- to 1,500-gallon capacity were new to the Central Florida area. Bringing them to hospitals, municipalities, job shops, independent testing labs, and metal processors doing laser cutting where pressure and flow are critical became CGS’s trademark.

The story is often told about a customer who had two manifolds holding six liquid cylinders. Operators changed out three or more cylinders each day, and every tank contained residual product. “Our microbulk system eliminated a 20 percent product waste, and we became a hero overnight,” says Leaman. Some accounts saw a reduction of gas consumption as high as 50 percent once CGS switched them from cylinder manifolds to microbulk. The introduction of microbulk in the market became a game changer.

NEXT GENERATION

Bob Leaman laughs with sheer joy when he’s asked the question, “What’s next for CGS?” Without hesitation, he responds: “That it celebrates 100 years of service to customers.”

Leaman is 73 years old, with the heart and drive of someone 50 years younger. The same holds for Bob Fine, 62. Neither of these gentlemen have plans to retire. Leaman tried it once and hated it. They come to work every day expecting great things 17

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Member Profile: Compressed Gas Solutions to happen. They maintain their CDL licenses, make weekend deliveries, do installations, and often are seen crawling through pipes in the ceiling.

Their sons have joined the company, and admit having a hard time keeping up with their fathers. Dean Leaman, who serves as sales manager, Mike Fine, who heads up industrial sales, and Tom Fine, who does piping and installations, bring an impressive amount of experience to Compressed Gas Solutions as well. The younger Leaman previously worked at multiple independent distributorships as well as a major, and even started his own welding supply business in Miami, which he later sold. Mike Fine has worked for several major distributors in sales and branch management, while Tom Fine has focused on safety and air separation plant operations for a supplier.

“Responding to customers’ needs is what we do best,” Leaman says. “The big companies just don’t do it well, and we think we do. That’s been our success.” Maintaining that success involves upholding a passionate desire for customer service. “This is a serious business,” says Leaman, “and the understanding of passion and drive is a serious undertaking.”

Top: Bulk tanks include 6,000- and 1,500-gallon argon bulk tanks, 3,000- and 1,500-gallon oxygen tanks, a 1,500-gallon nitrogen tank, and a 10-ton CO2 receiver.

Bottom: All cylinders are barcoded and read while filling takes place.

Ross Ramsey, fill plant assistant, readies the oxygen cylinders.

Spring 2016

So what does happen when experience, skillsets, confidence, gas supply technologies, supply chain excellence, passionate employees and a commitment to customer service all come together? Dean Leaman says it best: “Every day, we open the doors and get it done. If we take good care of our employees, and we all take good care of our customers, the rest is easy.”

Top: Store Manager Bill Brooks is available to help customers in the newly remodeled showroom, which draws raves for its strong, industrial look and easy access to products.

Bottom: Some customers have seen a reduction of gas consumption as high as 50 percent once CGS switches them from cylinder manifolds to microbulk.

19

Seamless Cored Wires Productive – Consistent – Extremely Low Hydrogen

voestalpine Böhler Welding manufactures a comprehensive range of seamless, copper coated fluxand metal-cored welding wires for carbon and high strength steels, low-temperature steels, weathering and creep resistant steels. They feature superior, all-position welding productivity in manual, mechanized and robotic applications. With initial hydrogen levels well within AWS class H4, along with absolute protection against moisture reabsorption due to the seamless design, they offer the best possible performance in the prevention of hydrogen cracking.

Excellent wire feeding, current transfer and arc stability are additional key characteristics, providing a stable process and high quality welds.

Engineered by the Leading Welding Consumables Developers – voestalpine Böhler Welding.

voestalpine Bohler Welding USA Inc. www.voestalpine.com/welding

GAWDA’s Consultant Corner

DOT, Security, OSHA & EPA

GAWDA Safety Committee — Sample Safety Practices Many safety-practice documents are readily available to members by michael dodd

Y

our GAWDA Safety Committee meets on a monthly basis via conference calls and face to face annually at the Spring Management Conference. One of the main goals of the committee is to help our membership to reduce accidents in the workplace and protect our customers.

Over the years the committee has published several items we call Sample Safety Practices which are items that the members can take and use as published, or modify to suit their particular company needs.

These are kept on the GAWDA website under the “Members Only Reference” section.

Members must have an ID and password to view these documents. GAWDA Headquarters can easily set you up for this function, and provide instructions on how to locate the documents.

Here is what we have published so far: • Backing and Parking • Customer Safety at Member Sites • Cylinder Connections at Customer Sites • Cylinder Deliveries at Customer Sites with Stairs and Ramps • Delivery Survey • Driver Distractions • Load Securement • LPG Vendor Audit Checklist • New Employee Safety Orientation Checklist • Retail Security Premises Safety • Safe Cylinder Handling • Suggestions for Best Practices • Training Form Cover Letter • Training Record • Transport of Pressurized Liquid Containers in an Elevator Two newly-published Sample Safety Practices are: • Guidelines for Leaking Cylinders at Customer Sites • Ergonomics in the Workplace As you can see, the committee has been very busy putting items together to help our membership.

We are always looking for more items to work on and would appreciate any suggestions for future projects that you might have. Just pass along any suggestions to any of the GAWDA Safety Committee members or myself.

GAWDA’s DOT, Security, OSHA & EPA Consultant Michael Dodd is president of MLD Safety Associates in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. Members can reach him at 573-718-2887 and MLDSafety@hotmail.com.

Members of GAWDA can access safety materials online at: www.gawda.org/resources/members-only-reference-materials Spring 2016

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GAWDA’s Consultant Corner

FDA & Medical Gases

The Two Critical Questions For Your Food Compliance Is my business a ‘Qualified Facility’? by thomas l. badstubner

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he new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) food regulations are now in place (21 CFR Part 117). Though many of the new requirements are similar to the old regulations, the emphasis is now on having a Food Safety Management System rather than a checklist of activities to assure compliance.

“Food gas” includes any gas used in foods and beverages.

Among other important regulations, there are two significant provisions in the new regulations that could seem challenging to implement: • Hazard Analysis and Risk-Based Preventive Controls (HARPC) • Supply-Chain Program Fortunately, the new regulations contain some small business exemptions and alternatives for these requirements. In summary, if you can be considered a “Qualified Facility” under the FDA rules, your compliance burden is reduced.

IS MY BUSINESS A “QUALIFIED FACILITY”?

Answer these two questions to determine if your company is a Qualified Facility and exempt from a formal HARPC and a Supply-Chain Program: 1. For the previous three years, did your company’s food sales average less than $500,000 per year (adjusted for inflation)?

2. Was the majority of your food gas sales to a consumer, restaurant or retail food establishment within your state or within 275 miles of your plant?

If you answered “Yes” to both questions, you can claim FDA’s “qualified facility exemption.”

HOW DOES THE QUALIFIED FACILITY EXEMPTION AFFECT ME?

If you are a qualified facility, you can avoid conducting a formal HARPC and Supply-Chain Program. Instead, you need to send the FDA an “attestation” (by December 2018) that you: • Have identified the potential hazards associated with the food gas being produced • Are implementing preventive controls to address the hazards • And are monitoring the performance of the preventive controls to ensure that such controls are effective • Or are subject to food safety laws of other jurisdictions along with licenses, permits, inspections, etc.

The attestation would be resubmitted every two years (during re-registration) and anytime a change is needed.

GAWDA’s FDA & Medical Gases Consultant Thomas L. Badstubner is president of AsteRisk LLC in Lewisville, Texas. Members can reach him at 508-883-0927 and tom@asteriskllc.com.

Even if you are qualified for the exemption, you might decide to conduct the HARPC anyway.

We have prepared free HARPC templates for GAWDA distributor members’ use.

HAZARD ANALYSIS AND RISK-BASED PREVENTIVE CONTROLS (HARPC)

Even if you are qualified for the exemption, you might decide to conduct the HARPC anyway.

We have prepared free HARPC templates for GAWDA distributor members’ use. If you qualify for the exemption, you do not need to make

Spring 2016

23

FDA & Medical Gases this decision until 2018. This will give you ample time to see how the HARPC templates fit into your compliance program.

If you decide to implement the HARPC templates, we have included the required Food Safety Plan elements: written hazard analysis, preventive controls, supply-chain program, recall plan, monitoring procedures, written corrective action procedures, and verification procedures.

SUPPLY-CHAIN PROGRAM

If your company can claim the “qualified facility exemption” above, you can also be exempt from the formal Supply-Chain Program. However, the new sample food gas procedures already include the necessary provisions for the Supply-Chain Program.

The Compressed Gas Association is presently developing a food gas supplier qualification publication. We will harmonize with this CGA publication when it is available.

Your risk analysis for food gases will consider if a “supply-chain-applied control” is necessary. A supply-chain-applied control is required if a food safety hazard exists for your raw material and you are relying on your supplier (or their suppliers) to control the hazard. If the supply-chain-applied control is

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not applied directly by your supplier, you must verify/review the control.

Will you need to audit your supplier? The answer is “maybe.”

If there is a food safety hazard in your raw material that will be controlled by your supplier, and there is a reasonable probability that exposure to the hazard will result in serious adverse health consequences or death to humans, then you must either: • Conduct an onsite audit yourself or by a third-party, or • Obtain a written determination that other verification activities of the supplier provide adequate assurance that the hazards are controlled.

If an onsite audit must be conducted, the auditor must be qualified and may not have a financial conflict of interest in the results of the audit. In some cases, an inspection by federal, state or local authorities may be used instead of conducting your own audit.

Contact tom@asteriskllc.com for: • An annotated copy of the new regulations • Sample food/beverage gas procedures • Sample HARPC templates • Invitations to the monthly GAWDA Food Gas Roundtables.

Spring 2016

GAWDA’s Consultant Corner

Government Affairs & Human Resources

DOT Proposes New Safety Fitness Standards by richard p. schweitzer, esq.

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GAWDA’s Government Affairs and Human Resources Legal Consultant Rick Schweitzer is president of Richard P. Schweitzer, PLLC in Washington, D.C. He is also GAWDA’s general counsel. Members can reach him at 202-223-3040 and rpschweitzer@rpslegal.com.

he Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has stated that its proposed rule to revise its Safety Fitness Determination procedures for motor carriers (which includes all GAWDA members operating truck fleets) would allow the agency to assess approximately 75,000 carriers a month. By comparison, the FMCSA states it is currently able to investigate only 15,000 motor carriers annually — with fewer than half of those companies receiving a safety fitness rating.

The major changes proposed for the safety fitness determination methodology include: • There would no longer be three safety ratings: satisfactory, conditional or unsatisfactory. Rather, there would only be one safety rating: “unfit.”

• Companies would be assessed monthly, using fixed failure measures that are identified in the proposal. Stricter standards would be used for those Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs) with a higher correlation to crash risk: Unsafe Driving and Hours of Service Compliance.

• Violations of a revised list of “critical” and “acute” safety regulations would result in failing a BASIC. • All investigation results would be used, not just from comprehensive on-site reviews.

• A company would be proposed unfit if it: (1) failed two or more BASICs based exclusively on on-road safety data from 11 or more inspections with one or more violations in a single BASIC; (2) had violations of the proposed set of critical and acute regulations, identified through an investigation,

26

that cause the motor carrier to fail two or more BASICs; or (3) failed two or more BASICs based on a combination of data from inspections and investigation results.

Under the proposal, to assess roadside inspection data results the agency would require a minimum of 11 inspections with violations in a single BASIC within a 24-month period before a motor carrier could be eligible to be identified as “unfit.” If a carrier’s individual performance meets or exceeds the failure standards in the rule, it would then fail that BASIC. Unlike the current Safety Management System approach, the failure standard would be fixed by the rule as an absolute rather than relative standard, i.e., a carrier’s status in relation to that fixed measure would not be affected by other carriers’ performance (such as on a percentile basis). A safety fitness rating would only be impacted by a carrier’s own inspections and investigations.

The FMCSA is going forward with this proposed rule despite recent directives from Congress to reform the CSA program.

Failure of a BASIC based on either crash data or compliance with drug and alcohol requirements would only occur following a comprehensive investigation.

Additionally, in the proposed rule the FMCSA seeks input on whether hazardous materials carriers should be held to a more stringent standard (i.e., lower BASIC failure standards) than the Spring 2016

Government Affairs & Human Resources overall motor carrier population, as hazmat carriers have lower intervention thresholds under the current Safety Measurement System (SMS). The FMCSA is also specifically interested in feedback on whether the failure standard should be different for carriers that hold Hazardous Materials Safety Permits.

The FMCSA is going forward with this proposed rule despite recent directives from Congress to reform the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program. In the FAST Act, Congress required the FMCSA to commission a study by the National Research Council on the CSA program and its Safety Measurement System. The study must analyze the accuracy of the BASIC scores in identifying high-risk carriers and predicting or correlating with future crash risk, crash severity, or other safety indicators for motor carriers, including the highest risk carriers.

The FMCSA is also specifically interested in feedback on whether the failure standard should be different for carriers that hold Hazardous Materials Safety Permits.

The study must also analyze the methodology used to calculate BASIC percentiles and identify carriers for enforcement, including the weights assigned to particular violations and the tie between crash risk and specific regulatory violations in accurately identifying and predicting future crash risk for motor carriers.

The study must also look at gaps in data collection, alternatives to SMS scores, and the use of SMS alerts and scores by the public. This study and a report to Congress must be completed by May 2017. After the report is issued, the FMCSA will have 120 days to publish a corrective action plan to address the issues raised in the report and in the prior reports on CSA published by the Government Accountability Office and the DOT Inspector General.

Under the FAST Act, information regarding alerts and the relative percentile for each BASIC developed under the CSA program may not be used for safety fitness determinations until the DOT Inspector General certifies that the CSA reform report is submitted to Congress, the FMCSA’s corrective action plan is published and implemented, and all CSA issues have been resolved.

But because the proposed Safety Fitness Determination (SFD) rule would be based on absolute standards rather than percentile scores that are relative to other carriers’ performance, the FMCSA asserts that the proposed rule is not precluded by the CSA study and reforms mandated in the FAST Act. Spring 2016

27

WHAT’S WORKING IN WAREHOUSING

NEW OPPORTUNITY, COMPETITION AND GROWTH: THAT’S ‘WHERE IT’S AT’ IN WAREHOUSING TODAY

BY CHARLES MCCHESNEY, SENIOR EDITOR

If you’re looking for “the next big thing” in the welding and gases distribution industry, you need only look to the space where you keep your inventory.

“Warehousing is almost en vogue,” says Thomas J. Goldsby, the Harry T. Manguarian Jr. Foundation Professor of Logistics at The Ohio State University. Warehousing technology is advancing all facets of the discipline quickly, new facilities are going up across the country and thousands of college students are studying how to better design, organize and run warehouses these days, he says.

The field is also exciting because it is changing rapidly, says Goldsby. “There hasn’t been this rate of change, maybe ever,” the professor explains. Such changes are playing out in the welding and gases community as distributors recognize the savings opportunities and sales growth potentials that can come from improving systems and making warehouse operations more responsive and efficient.

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THINKING IT THROUGH

The experiences of several GAWDA distributor and supplier members who recently have taken on warehousing projects offer lessons about what works and what to think about when considering, or when undertaking, a warehouse strategy or expansion. Their stories offer ideas about how to make money or save money.

Indiana Oxygen Company in Indianapolis went through an expansion and extensive reorganization of its warehousing in 2015. Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Michael Gunnels says the work focused on rethinking what ought to be stocked and why.

“We engaged a consultant to take a look at the way we do inventory in our company,” Gunnels says. Using a model Spring 2016

Photo courtesy of Jennifer Held/Indiana Oxygen

taught at Texas A&M University’s Industrial Distribution program, they sought to “stratify” inventory. “You look at the inventory, how much it’s moving, and how much money you are making in terms of gross margin and how much it costs you to warehouse it,” Gunnels says. From there, the task is to “make good decisions” on what to carry, in what quantities, and then where to make new investments.

Indiana Oxygen’s assessment uncovered some pieces of inventory that had long been forgotten and were no longer on the books, Gunnels said, calling these “ghosts in the closet.”

With a laugh, he recalls how the reorganization uncovered hundreds of them. One “ghost” created an opportunity for Indiana Oxygen and a customer. “There were drums of basic 70S-6 wire that all of a sudden, the customer just wasn’t there for us anymore. They wanted us to keep it in stock, then all of a sudden they didn’t,” he says. “Next thing you know, several years pass by and we all say, ‘what is this?’”

So recognizing that the wire is a common enough product and was in perfectly good shape, Gunnels and his team found a customer who wanted it and sold it to him “at a tremendous discount.” That find resulted in the company “recouping some of our lost money and making a good onetime deal for a customer.”

Spring 2016

PRODUCT AGREEMENT

Other such “ghostly” examples can be harder to exorcise.

Sometimes customers want a distributor to stock specialty items. Gunnels pointed to some unique plasma welding consumables that one customer wanted Indiana Oxygen to keep on hand. That was fine for the distributor — as long as the customer kept buying it. But when the customer stopped coming in, Indiana Oxygen was left with inventory on hand with no customer, he says.

The lesson Indiana Oxygen took from the situation was to create “a product-support agreement” with the customer, the COO says. That was an agreement that, in essence, said, “Whatever we have on our shelves, you’ll purchase.” If a customer backs away from such an agreement, it may be time to think carefully about taking on the expense of stocking inventory that could end up going unsold, according to Gunnels.

PRODUCT = MONEY

From a financial standpoint, “Inventory is always bad,” observes Syracuse University Professor Donald McLean. As someone who teaches logistics at S.U.’s Whitman School of Management and who has decades of experience in logistics with industrial, medical and high-tech companies, he offers an 29

WHAT’S WORKING IN WAREHOUSING

“ Money tied up doesn’t get better with time. It gets dirty, rusty and old.”

DONALD MCLEAN ADJUNCT PROFESSOR SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

unflattering assessment of inventory on the shelves. “Money tied up doesn’t get better with time. It gets dirty, rusty and old.”

The movements he sees in warehousing today reflect an antipathy toward keeping inventory on hand. “Trends are faster service, keeping costs low, shipping more frequently and buying more just-in-time.” Time is a constant concern, McLean says, because “customers want faster delivery.”

BORDER SOLVED

Exocor, a Canadian-based supplier of wire, flux and other consumables, opened a warehouse facility 30 miles from its St. Catharines, Ontario headquarters, across the border in Buffalo, New York, as a way to improve its shipping process and timely delivery.

The move was undertaken partly to get product to American distributors faster and more reliably, says Michael Falle, warehouse operations manager. Unlike shipments that came from the Ontario, Canada headquarters, products shipped from the new facility in Buffalo no longer have to travel through the sometimes-congested U.S.-Canadian border crossing, he notes.

With the company growing quickly, expanding with a warehouse in the United States made sense because it eliminated what had been a days-long window of shipping times, according to Falle. “We don’t have that problem now.” The Buffalo warehouse carries nearly 500 stock keeping units (SKUs) of the most popular items with U.S. customers. Less frequently ordered items are kept in the warehouse on the Canadian side where they can be retrieved in a day. “We’re trying to make the border invisible; not a factor,” Falle says.

STRATIFYING PRODUCT

Differentiating between the most frequently shipped goods and those that spend more time on warehouse shelves is an important part of organizing warehouse space, says Brad Vance, president of Vance Strategic Consulting Group, a consulting firm that preaches Texas A&M’s inventory stratification methodology.

“Item stratification is stocking the right item and determining out of a company’s product mix what should they be stocking, what should they no longer stock, what is profitable, what’s not 30

profitable and giving them a better view into it,” Vance says.

While “there are a lot of mathematical formulas that go into it,” one segment of that picture isn’t mathematical at all; it’s visual and it’s powerful: the “spaghetti diagram.” The diagram is a simple concept wherein on an overhead map of the warehouse, lines trace how a worker travels through the space to pick, pack and ship products. The resulting lines of “spaghetti” show clearly how many steps, and how many extra steps, are being taken. Vance recalls how one client, after reviewing a spaghetti diagram, changed where some things were stored and saved 52 percent of all steps on the picking side.

Another way Vance helps distributors find savings is by asking why certain practices are followed. In his experience, gases and welding distributors tend to be heavy on paperwork, using hard-copy forms through the order-taking, order-filling and order-recording process, he says. When asking why this process is done, he often finds the answer comes down to, “because that’s how I was trained when I started.”

“A lot of times distributors started doing something because of a requirement back in the day that no longer exists.” Still, asking the question makes it possible to take another look at what’s being done and to change processes. “It’s OK to no longer have this pink piece of paper we’ve always had,” he says.

ONLINE PUSH

Few distributors have seen their business change as dramatically as Bob Goodliffe has. He joined his family’s distributorship, J.W. Goodliffe & Son, in Linden, New Jersey, in 1986. Fourteen years later he pushed the company into Internet sales, taking the hardgoods side of the business to a worldwide client base under the CyberWeld name.

The results of that leap online have been dramatic. Today, 90 percent of CyberWeld’s business comes through the Internet, Goodliffe says. Total sales are up nearly 1,000 percent since 1986. In the same time, the number of employees has increased from 22 to just 29, a relatively minor 33 percent increase in comparison. Goodliffe has revamped the company’s warehousing to keep up with the near-10-fold increase in

“ It’s okay to no longer have this pink piece of paper we’ve always had.”

BRAD VANCE MID/CEO VANCE STRATEGIC

Spring 2016

Capitalizing on Tremendous Market Potential.

Automated fill plant captures a rapidly growing market in the Permian Basin.

Technology for Today—and Tomorrow B&J Welding’s new facility in Midland, TX features a fully automated palletized fill island with complete pump control and regenerative variable-frequency drives. It houses automatic liquid-fill manifolds, medical E-oxygen fill manifolds, helium-filling equipment with booster pump, and a specialty-gas lab – all designed and built by Weldcoa.

“This market is industrial-gas intensive,” said Steve Hodges, B&J project manager and part owner. “As the region’s oil and gas business has exploded, so has the need for state-of-the-art welding technology, including higher-quality welding gases.”

Automation Delivers on Demand Weld shops also look for higher quality in terms of gas-mix accuracy and repeatability. So, Hodges and his team visited a recent Weldcoa customer that is fully automated.

“Seeing how the distributor leveraged the automation to drive throughput and optimize consistency and purity helped convince us to automate our new plant. Automation takes some of the need for operator expertise out of the picture, thanks to the many features with the island’s control terminals, and training was easy,” noted Hodges.

Transition Without Disruption The new Weldcoa systems were installed in approximately 7000 sq. ft. of the Midland plant’s 20,000-sq.-ft. footprint.

The location also includes retail and office space, a small warehouse,and the Weldcoa-equipped spec-gas lab. “The

+

“The growth of our customer base, and their incredibly positive reaction to our new systems, level of quality and responsiveness, tells me our investment was the right decision.”

Steve Hodges, Project Manager, B&J Welding Supply

preparation and planning by the Weldcoa team paid huge dividends,” he said, recalling the synchronization of the new building construction and fill-plant installation.

“Weldcoa gave us and our construction team every detail we needed to ensure we had no installation surprises.”

Information Serves Customers and Sales

“We have also provided training to our sales team.

They’ve all spent time watching the automated fill island run, talking to the operators about what’s happening and why the automation helps improve productivity and quality.

This knowledge lets them communicate better with their customers and prospects—this is critical, I believe, to ensuring we know how to sell our new capabilities,” noted Hodges.

In addition to the other benefits from automation, the Sur-Fill software delivers reporting. “The software provides the gas-quality documentation our customers have begun to request on a regular basis to share with their customers.

Sur-Fill, therefore, strengthens our link in the supply chain,” concluded Hodges.

=

Increased Accuracy

Faster Response Time

To learn more about the advantages of automation call Weldcoa at 630.806.2000. Visit Weldcoa.com.

=

More Customers

“ We had stuff in the bathrooms. We had stuff in the old computer room.

We had stuff everywhere.”

sales. A business that once was a local supplier of gases and hardgoods now has a nationwide customer base and in 2013, had a remarkable 22 inventory turns.

INFORMATION SOURCE

Goodliffe sought out and followed advice from his shipper in working to further the business, he explains. FedEx advised him how adding warehouse space in either Denver, Colorado, or Phoenix, Arizona, was the way to keep up with his particular set of Internetdriven demands, he explained. Customer demand had made the No.1 state for Cyberweld sales faraway California, instead of his headquarters-based New Jersey. The No. 2 state for the company’s sales is Texas.

So in October of 2013, with the Phoenix real estate market still in the post-Great Recession doldrums, Goodliffe leased 4,500 square feet of warehouse space in a largely vacant 210,000 square-foot industrial development near the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway The best kept secrets in the Welding Industry Airport. It was a sweet deal then. “We got • Widest range of Hardfacing and Cladding wires a dirt-cheap lease and they did whatever • Including a New all-position general hardfacing wire we wanted,” he says. With business con• Extensive line of Specialty Alloy Stainless Steel wires tinuing to boom, the company doubled the • Including duplex super-duplex stainless, and controlled ferrite alloys lease to 9,000 square feet in May 2015.

• Complete line of Cobalt based wires ROBERT GOODLIFFE PRESIDENT CYBERWELD

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SECOND BUILDOUT

Meanwhile, continuing rapid growth left every inch of CyberWeld’s New Jersey facility pushed to the max— and being used as storage space. “We had stuff in the bathrooms. We had stuff in Spring 2016

WHAT’S WORKING IN WAREHOUSING the old computer room. We had stuff everywhere,” Goodliffe says. So the company sought out other space nearby. This time, it was the company’s FedEx driver who stepped up to help out.

When he heard the company was thinking about moving, he told them he’d found “perfect space” in a newly vacant building on his route. That’s where Goodliffe ended up, leasing 8,200 more square feet of warehouse space in Roselle, New Jersey, a 10-minute drive from the Linden headquarters. This move allows the Linden site to remain focused on serving customers as a welding and gases distributor for the local market, as it has for 67 years, Goodliffe notes. Meanwhile, the Roselle facility mostly serves the needs of Internet customers.

The Arizona warehouse was laid out with the help of some sketches from FedEx and the Roselle warehouse was laid out the same way. “We took what we learned in Arizona and duplicated it,” Goodliffe says. Neither is a model of technological innovation, however, he adds. “We don’t do bins, don’t do a bar system. Remarkably we do it with a very small amount of labor.” Now, the distributor plans on changing that. He is considering a complete revamp of the inventory control system, integrating the warehouse and his computer system to match the speed of the Internet.

it’s growing, or if it faces increasing complexity, ERP could be a good investment, he contends.

Some changes in ERP software are driven by the largest warehouse operators, such as large manufacturers, major shippers and the Internet giants. Those changes are showing up in software for smaller operations. For instance, Bodla says, ERP can be run in the cloud, allowing even smaller companies to operate complex systems without having to spend on complex computer networks. Instead, the software can be accessed from anywhere there is an Internet connection.

“Everyone’s kind of adopted the cloud message. I feel like everyone is saying, ‘we’re cloud too.’ One big thing I always come back to is, are you providing your clients with the RANGA BODLA ability to access their information WHOLESALE and run their business from anyDISTRIBUTION INDUSTRY LEAD where at anytime?”

NETSUITE Other technology, such as bar

ERP AND THE CLOUD

Software to integrate operations, called enterprise resource planning (ERP), is becoming increasingly common and more justifiable as a business tool and investment, according to those in the industry.

ERP can link an order from when it comes in, to when it is picked and packed in the warehouse, to when it is delivered, and if necessary, reordered from the supplier. As part of an overall approach, it can help reduce errors, expose bottlenecks and free up warehouse workers for other tasks.

It’s also something that is useful to many types of distributors. Ranga Bodla, wholesale distribution industry lead with software company NetSuite, says ERP can be scaled for distributors of many sizes except perhaps the smallest. “A two-person shop, probably not; QuickBooks is probably sufficient,” he says. But for others, ERP might be right-sized. If a company is larger, or if Spring 2016

33

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WHAT’S WORKING IN WAREHOUSING

The need for expansion at New Jersey-based Cyberweld was obvious, says president Robert Goodliffe. Inventory was even stored in carpeted office space (left). New warehouse space (right) was leased in New Jersey and Arizona. Photos courtesy of Cyberweld. codes, scanners and radio frequency IDs (RFID) tags, can help simplify warehouse work and avoid errors. A worker with a handheld scanner doesn’t have to know what the product does or even what it looks like, because as long as the scanner recognizes it, the product can be picked and packed.

ERROR FREE: A GOAL

Nevertheless, a warehouse manager who has to enter products on a spreadsheet will slip up from time to time, says Syracuse University’s McLean. However, a state-of-the-art warehouse that uses bar codes to identify each item and each storage space, and ties it together with an ERP can reduce day-to-day errors and keep inventory from becoming lost or “forgotten.” McLean adds that error “is a key measure in any warehouse,” but even with the most up-to-date technology, error-free operations remain a goal, not a reality, he says.

The increasing affordability of the kinds of technologies that are available to automate warehouse processes is going a long way toward helping more distributors consider incorporating them, notes Sitaram “Sid” Geddam, NetSuite’s vice president and general manager, Warehouse Management Systems. “I walk into a lot of warehouses and they all have bar codes but they’re not actually using them because they don’t have the technology, or it wasn’t affordable; you needed a scanning device. Now, for a couple hundred dollars, you can get a mobile device with a scanning system on it.

Getting inventory tracking in place is the first step, even if you don’t want to invest in a larger system.”

It’s the same for other technologies SITARAM GEDDAM VP/GENERAL MANAGER WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS NETSUITE Spring 2016

such as voice picking and voice putaway, and automating via systems such as pick to light, and even warehouse robots, according to Geddam. “RFID has made a huge comeback because of the technology. It used to be seen as a significant investment with huge costs and very little value, but as the technology has matured, you can employ RFID technology in your warehouse for less than $10,000 versus what used to be hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of cost in the past,” he notes.

RETHINKING WHERE, HOW

Another trend in logistics that is gaining popularity is the idea of outsourcing the warehouse function entirely. Some may want to consider a third-party logistics provider, known as a 3PL, which offers an off-site facility to warehouse their inventories.

It’s a viable option for many, suggests Rick Blasgen, president and chief executive officer of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals. That’s because “the warehousing function, the distribution function is becoming much more professional in its nature, because the buildings that we use are beginning to add value, as opposed to being just places to store stuff. They’re connected with the transportation arm, and they can provide light manufacturing and different types of activities in these buildings. So it’s not just about storing stuff until somebody wants it. There’s a lot of value-added services that go on in those buildings.”

Blasgen sees a huge rise in the technologies being used in warehouses these days, too. “There’s a lot going on in modern warehousing in terms of GPS inside the warehouse and [the use of] radio frequency applications, so we know where inventory is along the way. Apps are being used to send information from one supply chain partner to another. That type of technology is alive and well because anything we can do to know where 35

our inventory is along the way eliminates the variability and the unknown,” he relates.

to do those kinds of jobs, and we anticipate that situation will worsen in the future.”

Another human factor, and an additional trend at the crux BOOSTED SOPHISTICATION of today’s supply chain picture, is the changing expectations of Warehouse functions are growing increasingly sophisticatconsumers for ultra-fast shipping, adds Maloney. “Customers ed, and warehouse workers may have to follow suit, believes aren’t going to wait a week or two for their products to arrive David Maloney, chief editor of DC Velocity. “Warehouses are any longer. They want them faster, they want them in smaller becoming more complex. There are more computers involved quantities, they don’t want to wait to accumulate orders until in them, there is more automation involved in them, there are they can get a certain minimum. It used to be that you could requirements for companies to want to track their inventory build a warehouse in the middle of Nebraska and still get better, to know where things are, and their customers are even products to most of the United States within three or four demanding that. That requires technology and that requires days. Now, people want it the next day or in two days, so it people who can handle the technology, work with it, repair it, may no longer be practical to do that because you can’t afford install it,” Maloney contends. He acknowledges though, that to air ship everything.” “there’s a growing lack of technicians who are trained and able That expectation is impacting many aspects of the supply chain, he says, from “how transportation networks are designed, “ There’s a lot going on in modern warehousing in terms of how warehouses are designed, GPS inside the warehouse and radio frequency applications.” what kind of inventory is carRICK BLASGEN ried in a warehouse. There’s also PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER what’s called SKU proliferation, COUNCIL OF SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT PROFESSIONALS there’s just an explosion that most

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WHAT’S WORKING IN WAREHOUSING companies are facing with the number of SKUs they have to carry,” according to Maloney.

‘TECHNO-BINS’

Of course, technology does not have to be Internet connected to make a difference in the way distribution operations are enhanced. Systems can be as simple as bins.

WestAir Gases and Equipment in San Diego, California, has been growing. Squeezed by high real estate costs in Coastal California, WestAir consolidated its San Diego area warehousing to a single facility in National City, just south of San Diego.

President and COO Steve Byers says that to make the best use of space, WestAir purchased rotating bins for some goods.

The bins allow workers to pick and pack without moving far.

Bins figured in the reorganization of Indiana Oxygen as well, according to Gunnels. “We had gotten away from being bin-located. As we became a bigger operation, it become extremely difficult to train a new guy as to where everything was at, especially if he didn’t have experience in the field.”

During the 2013 expansion to new warehouse space, “we took the opportunity to get ourselves back in line with that practice of being bin located. That was certainly a plus for us,” Gunnels says.

Delille Oxygen Company in Columbus, Ohio found an effective, if rather low-tech way, of dealing with a long-standing problem: delivering empty cylinders. Recalls Josh Weinmann, vice president, “Customers complained that they were receiving empty cylinders.” In that instance, a full cylinder needed to be

WestAir installed automated rotating bins to make the best use of expensive real estate at its National City, California warehouse. Photo courtesy of WestAir. Spring 2016

37

located, loaded up and delivered to the customer, squandering time and miles of driving, he notes.

The solution Delille settled on is shrink wrapping. Each time a tank is filled, a plastic sleeve is placed above the cylinder collar and it is shrink wrapped with a heat gun, enclosing the valve assembly while leaving room JOSH WEINMANN for a cylinder cap. Now, a quick VICE PRESIDENT glance tells a delivery person or DELILLE OXYGEN customer whether a tank is full.

That action has greatly reduced customer complaints and costly return trips, Weinmann says. As a bonus, the shrink-wrapped sleeves include Delille’s name and phone number, putting the company in front of the customer every time a tank is opened.

DEMAND DRIVING ADDITION

Sometimes, market demand may require extensive physical changes, and such a case is Oxygen Supply Company in White Plains, Maryland, which is going through major updating to its warehousing facilities. With a power plant opening across the street, the distributor is converting what served as its warehouse into a 3,000 square-foot showroom and turning two other spaces on the same property into 4,500 square feet of warehouse space. President Brant Romero says when it came to laying out the warehouse area, the company relied on its own 30 years of experience to provide the needed expertise.

Not all of the expansion process for the new warehouse, which is opening this spring, has been easy, he says. There have been the usual issues with contractors, complicated by cold weather delaying the pouring of concrete, and, of course, typical construction red tape. “Waiting for permits is the worst part,” Romero says. His advice to anyone taking on such a product: “Drink a lot of coffee. Nothing goes like it should.”

DO THE RESEARCH

Goodliffe made the decision to lease instead of buying or building when he moved to expand three times since 2013. He offers two pieces of advice to those contemplating additions or builds of warehouse space: “Research the daylights out of your landlord and try to build in some sort of safety net in your lease.” After finding out all he could about the people leasing the property, Goodliffe negotiated a five-year lease with an escape clause that would let him get out of the space after three years. There would still be a cost if that was necessary, he said, “but it would cost me far less than the entire two years of lease payments.” He said he chose leasing to 38

Spring 2016

WHAT’S WORKING IN WAREHOUSING avoid tying up cash and because markets change so quickly, particularly for businesses that, like CyberWeld, are heavily involved with Internet purchasers.

Indiana Oxygen’s Gunnels says suppliers can be very helpful during warehouse and logistic reorganizations. While his company was revamping its processes and warehouse space, suppliers agreed to alter, at least temporarily, shipping cost formulas. It gave the company some breathing room during the change and resulted in shipments going direct to branches, rather than being delivered to the main warehouse. That saved, and continues to save, Indiana Oxygen shipping costs and warehouse space and time, Gunnels says.

Upgrading a fill plant is a considerable capital expense for a distributor and can alter work flow dramatically. “But new investment can create other bottlenecks,” says Weldcoa President Hector Villarreal. To avoid that, starting in 1998, Weldcoa, which makes all manner of equipment for filling, sorting and transporting gas cylinders, began providing total analysis to distributors.

Before then, distributors would complain that they had bought new equipment but their operations weren’t necessarily more efficient. “I bought this system, but I’m still having

“ You look at the inventory, how much it’s moving, and how much money you are making in terms of gross margin, and how much it costs you to warehouse it.”

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problems,” Villarreal would hear. “Sometimes,” he says, “they just moved the problem further downfield.”

Now, when asked, Weldcoa staff look at the entire fill plant operation to spot bottlenecks and make recommendations to distributors regarding how they can make changes to improve things. It is, Villarreal says, the kind of analysis majors can get done by their own in-house teams. Independent distributors don’t have such teams on staff and can’t do it themselves because they are busy

meeting day-to-day deadlines and demands, he adds. One issue that pops up frequently are sort islands — where returning cylinders are inspected and sorted — that turn into unplanned storage areas. “Nothing should live there,” he says. “But things kind of accumulate there.”

CENTRAL TRUCKING

The benefits of reorganizing, or at least reexamining warehouse practices, can stretch far beyond the warehouse’s shelves and bins.

When WestAir reorganized its warehousing, it created a new system that centralized the company’s San Diego area truck fleet at a single location. With the fleet, gases and hardgoods all in one place, the company’s process was simplified.

“When we delivered gas all the hardgoods were on the truck as well, says WestAir’s’ Byers. The move has proven to be a good decision. “The biggest benefit is we’ve been able to better serve our customers while taking advantage of working capital and really leveraging our fixed costs,” he adds.

Leveraging fixed costs was a benefit when WestAir added to its ERP a system that included automated cylinder management.

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“The biggest benefit is we’ve been able to better serve our customers while taking advantage of working capital and really leveraging our fixed costs.”

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is seeing more efficient use of cylinder inventory. “We’ve repurposed threequarters-of-a-million-dollars-worth of cylinders,” he says.

As WestAir grew through acquisitions in 2013 and 2015, it linked the new facilities to its ERP system as well. “We acquired in Texas and we have since built another location and made investments in Texas. Same thing Spring 2016

WHAT’S WORKING IN WAREHOUSING in the Central Valley. We acquired a business there and have since built a new facility in Fresno, California.” Each location was converted to the same ERP system, Byers said, and that improves the company’s ability to find product when it’s needed. “We converted everybody to the same ERP system,” Byers says. “I’m in San Diego and if the Bakersfield warehouse has something I need, I can pull from it, so we can take advantage of those synergies.”

EFFICIENCY STAGES

coming back for more, the bottom line for many warehouse questions. “OTIFNE,” is the acronym McLean and others use to remind themselves that customers expect every order on time, in full, with no errors. Everything in the warehouse is set up to make sure those expectations are met every day.

“Our expectation is we ship 100 percent all the time,” says Byers. “And we do pretty well on that.”

“Ultimately we are a service provider,” says Exocor’s Falle.

“At the end of the day we are here for our customers.”

With competition from the Internet showing no signs of slowing, and with large Internet-based operations spending millions of dollars on new warehousing facilities and technology, those in the welding and gases community will clearly need to continue to MICHAEL FALLE look for ways to improve how WAREHOUSE they utilize warehousing to main- OPERATIONS MANAGER EXOCOR tain their edge and profit.

Vance, who consults across many industries that involve warehousing functions, lays out a five-step ranking for warehouse operations. At the bottom are those that don’t label products or places and count on staff to know where things are.

At the top are those that utilize labels, bar codes, scanners and RFID technology and are always asking what else they can do.

For those companies that are working at the top levels, the next challenge is learning all they can from the data their system provides, Vance says. “Everything is data driven now.”

Even at a simple level, data provides money-saving information, he says. If a warehouse is holding five copies of an item and a look at the data shows the distributor sells only one copy a year, the conclusion is inescapable. Data can help show if certain goods are seasonal so warehouse placement can be altered One Machine for All Applications! to save steps during busy months and conserve valuable space during off pe● Digital Travel Speed Meter riods. And, if a distributor is trying to ● Built in dual contactors, gas manifold and cable anchor streamline inventory, data can help by highlighting products that have slowing ● Includes 8' of track, 2 magnets & 2 spacers demand. ● Lower profile case The drive for efficiency can’t be ● Large industrial rocker switches allowed to undermine the distributor’s ● Supported by our 3 year warranty ability to provide top-notch service. “Be careful when you’re consolidating that it doesn’t adversely impact your customer service. I think it’s important to stay focused on that,” says Byers.

Gunnels echoes that, saying “you have to make sure that the branches that you serve are going to be in the product that they need to serve their customers and there is going to be no disruption of that.”

For Indiana Oxygen, that required going through 2,000 SKUs or more, he says.

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WHAT’S WORKING IN WAREHOUSING THE NEW GENERATION

The warehousing arena may be a boon to gases and welding distributors in other ways, when considering the numbers of young employees this element may bring into the warehousing business, according to The Ohio State’s Goldsby.

There are 500 students majoring in logistics at that school right now, Goldsby says, a fact that shows, “This is really where the action in business is now.”

Some of that interest is perpetuated by the growing number of highly sophisticated warehouse operations, such as those run by Amazon, Zappos and the major delivery services. These businesses are creating new opportunities for those interested in logistics, Goldsby suggests. Another truth that many students may not recognize until they get out of college, he says, is that many business majors will find themselves in cubicles, sitting all day, looking at formulas on a computer screen. But those who graduate with degrees in logistics, in contrast, will often be on their feet and moving, learning about and altering the way their company moves and stores actual things, not just during their days, but throughout their careers.

‘BOTS— NEW WAVE OF WORKERS? Robots are on the rise!

Boston Dynamics’ humanoid moves a box (bit.ly/1phInfX). Fetch Robotics’ platform helps pickers (www.fetchrobotics.com/).

Will they replace human workers? Not likely, or soon, says Glenn Saunders, of the Center for Automation Technologies and Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Humanoids are way too expensive and face technical hurdles (such as sensing which part to pick). The Fetch Robotics approach is economical and augments workers, though. “Robotics and automation create jobs overall,” Saunders says.

“Companies must embrace robotics and automation to survive. If they don’t, they will lose productivity and will eventually become obsolete.”

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PREVENTING INVENTORY EVAPORATION HERE’S HOW YOU CAN CONVINCE EMPLOYEES THAT INVENTORY ACCURACY IS IMPORTANT

BY JON SCHREIBFEDER

M Jon Schreibfeder, president of Effective Inventory Management, Inc., of Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, has been named a subject matter expert in inventory management by the American Productivity and Quality Center.

He’s an advisor and guest lecturer in the Industrial Distribution Program at Purdue University, reachable at: info@effectiveinventory. com and at: 972-304-3325.

ost distributors realize the importance of an accurate perpetual inventory— that is, having the available quantity of an item in your computer agree with what is actually on the shelf in your warehouse.

Management realizes the bad things that happen when inventory accuracy doesn’t exist: • Wasted Time: If your inside salespeople constantly have to go out to the warehouse to check stock, they’re wasting time. They can’t walk out to the warehouse and answer phone calls at the same time. And, your customers’ time is also wasted as they sit on hold while you dash out to check stock.

Do your customers really enjoy listening to “Muzak,” or a 10-minute advertisement describing your commitment to customer service?

• Wasted Money: If inventory is lost in your warehouse, whether through misplacement, theft, or breakage, it must be replaced.

44

Buying replacement material is an expense.

And, like payroll, rent, or any other expense, the replacement material must be paid for with part of the distributor’s net profits.

For example, if $250 of material is lost per week ($13,000 per year), this $13,000 comes off of your bottom line. If your gross margin is 20 percent, it takes $65,000 in additional sales each year to make up for this loss!

• Disappointed Customers: If you promise material to a customer based on what your computer says is in stock, but the material isn’t actually available in your warehouse, the result is often a disappointed customer. You’ll lose your reputation as a reliable supplier.

And not being a reliable supplier is the best way to increase your competitor’s sales.

There’s little doubt that management realizes the importance of inventory accuracy. But, how do you convince your employees that inventory accuracy is important?

Spring 2016

PREVENTING INVENTORY EVAPORATION THE REAL COSTS

Everyone must understand the cost of bad inventory management. Many distribution employees behave as though their employers get the funds necessary to run the business from some magical source. These workers believe their paycheck is not dependent on how well they perform their jobs. Further, they are convinced that the company’s profits are two, three, or four times what is actually on the bottom line!

It is imperative that all of your employees, from the guy who sweeps the floor on up, realize that your company makes money by buying material at one price, and selling it to other companies or individuals at a higher price. Gross profits are the primary source of funds the company has to pay expenses. And your company is probably pressured by customers and competition to keep prices low, resulting in small gross profits. One category of expenses is wages, benefits and Value of Lost/Broken Material salaries.

Average Gross Margin % If you buy material, but it’s lost before it can be sold, that doesn’t

contribute to gross profits — that pile of money available to pay employees and other expenses. In fact, when material is broken or lost, money must be taken out of the pile to pay for replacement material (See Exhibit A).

If too much material is lost, there won’t be enough money in the pile of available cash to meet the payroll. (Management does not have the option of printing more cash in the back room —without risking a long, all-expense paid vacation at a government-run facility!)

LET THEM KNOW

At the end of every week, let everyone know what the material lost that week cost the company. How much money was wasted instead of being available to pay salaries, benefits, and other worthwhile expenses?

Consider using the formula in Exhibit B ADDITIONAL SALES NEEDED TO MAKE UP FOR LOST/ (next page) to calculate BROKEN MATERIAL the additional sales you must generate to make EXHIBIT A up for the lost material.

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PREVENTING INVENTORY EVAPORATION

SALES NEEDED TO MAKE UP FOR LOST MATERIAL Week

August 2

August 9

August 16

Missing

$310

$250

$264

$219

Damaged

$224

$184

$172

$158

Total

$534

$434

$436

$377

$2,670

$2,170

$2,180

Needed Sales

August 23

$1,885 EXHIBIT B

For example, if you lose $100 worth of material and your gross margin is 25 percent, you must generate $400 in additional sales to make up for the loss ($100 ÷ 25 percent = $400)!

A great way to communicate this information is to post a billboard showing how much material was lost or damaged each week, as well as the sales necessary to make up for the loss: When a warehouse person kicks a box out of the way, he or she must understand that they’re kicking the source of funds for their paycheck!

REWARD GOOD PERFORMANCE

You want to encourage your employees to always work in the best interests of your company. Why not compensate them, in part, on how well they protect your inventory asset? That is maintaining an accurate perpetual inventory. Many companies have seen a marked increase in inventory accuracy when they pay everyone who has access to inventory a small bonus if a predetermined level of cycle count accuracy is achieved.

There are two key elements that make these programs work: • The bonus applies to everyone who has access to inventory. This way, everyone sinks or swims together.

As a result, if someone sees a fellow worker stealing or abusing inventory, they no longer see it as that employee stealing or harming the company; they view it as taking money out of their own person-

al pocket. The result is that every pair of eyes in the warehouse views inventory as management views it: Something to be protected!

• The bonus affects the next possible paycheck. It is not tied to some end-of-year bonus that no one really understands. This also eliminates the idea that employees may feel that mistakes can be “made up for in the long run.” The reward or penalty must be as immediate as possible.

The bonus doesn’t have to be big for the program to be successful; just enough to “hurt” if it isn’t earned. After employees miss one or two bonuses, peer pressure will ensure that the guilty parties are more conscientious!

PROTECT AGAINST THEFT

Regrettably, theft is a common reason behind perpetual inventory discrepancies. Many companies find it hard to believe that their employees or customers would steal. But unfortunately stealing, especially petty theft, is a very common reason for “inventory shrinkage.” And a company that doesn’t admit that theft is a problem, or a potential problem, is just burying its head in the sand.

Some companies install security cameras and other theft-deterrent devices. While these high-tech solutions often work well in retail environments, their effectiveness in a distribution warehouse is questionable. True thieves usually put considerable thought, time and effort into getting around

You want to encourage your employees to always work in the best interests of your company. Why not compensate them, in part, on how well they protect your inventory asset.

46

Spring 2016

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PREVENTING INVENTORY EVAPORATION these systems (i.e., “casing the joint”) and continue to steal.

At the same time, honest employees often feel intimidated and resentful as “big brother” continually watches their every move. These feelings often discourage good and loyal employees from giving their all for the company.

A better way to discourage theft is for management to create an atmosphere that encourages effective inventory management: • Management can ensure that all material movement is properly recorded. It also can prevent any excuse for not recording material disbursements by placing a clipboard near every warehouse exit (It should show the information in Exhibit C.).

• Every day, a clerical employee updates your computer

Date

Quantity

Item #

with each transaction listed on the clipboard.

Management reviews these material withdrawals on a regular basis. The system must be kept simple.

• Don’t give your salespeople any reason for not recording every piece of every item they remove from stock. (In fact, if you let them design the procedures, then they won’t have any excuses not to follow them.)

Your company can have the most advanced state-of-theart computer software and warehouse equipment, however, if you haven’t implemented “best practice” policies and procedures to ensure that your on-hand quantities remain accurate, some of your inventory (and profits) are destined to evaporate into thin air.

•

Reason

Taken By

Feb 10

1

A-1234

Sample for Acme Construction

Jeff Miller

Feb 10

12

M-2356

Emergency for Jensen Controls Will Bring Back P.O.

Karen Becker EXHIBIT C

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The Warehouse Manager Makes It Great– Or Not Employee engagement, not employee enragement, is key to what your customers value most by jim ambrose

A Jim Ambrose, of Camillus, New York, is a consultant and the author of three books, 5 Fundamentals for the Wholesale Distribution Branch Manager; My Business Analysis; and Cracking Accounts. You can reach him at: jim@ jimambroseworkshops.com and 315-430-5631.

lot of new and very good investments are being made to the warehousing operations across the industry nowadays.

Technology upgrades and investments are not the whole story, however. A phrase that has been used and re-used for decades still holds true today: success is 15 percent technology and 85 percent leadership. However, it’s easy to miss the essential element of leadership when we think about warehouse operations.

Despite all the technology in automation, scanners and controls we add to our businesses, the people involved in the process still make the difference as to whether the return on investment truly pays off.

WHERE ERRORS HAPPEN

Through my own experience and by reviewing survey data based on thousands of managers who have attended my workshops, the largest error rates in warehousing come from the functions of receiving, pick, pack and ship.

There are many touch points to products and orders going on “out there” in the warehouse.

By far, the warehouse operation has more touch points than any other function in the distribution business. (This also has a lot to do with why it has the highest potential for errors.)

Investing in warehouse technology is a very important consideration in advancing the business. But there is another important ingredient that can make a technology investment either a true competitive advantage, or keep it at a smoke-and-mirrors showpiece stage. That important ingredient is the warehouse manager.

50

PEOPLE, EVERYWHERE

I have been in large redistribution centers and inventory hubs, and I have visited large and small distributor’s warehouses with the latest material-handling and order-service technologies. In every one of these warehouse operations, I saw people. Those people were working with, reading, adjusting, handling anomalies and special requests, and communicating when necessary to the office staff to be sure they understood exactly what the salesperson intended to put on the order.

If you are familiar with warehouse operations, you know the daily drill.

‘Net Speed’ is doing everything perfectly, and very fast.

Customers will pay for this, and will move toward businesses... that can provide them the fastest service...error-free.

When a business invests in technology, it does so with the goal of improving functional speed and accuracy– essential ingredients if your strategy is to have profitable share gain. I’ve introduced this concept using the term, “net speed.” (You can obtain more information about this concept in my book, the 10th anniversary edition of 5 Fundamentals for the Wholesale Distribution Branch Manager, 2nd edition, published by the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, NAW.) Simply put, net speed is doing everything perfectly, and very fast. Customers will pay Spring 2016

THE WAREHOUSE MANAGER MAKES IT GREAT — OR NOT

Despite all the technology in automation, scanners and controls we add to our businesses, the people involved in the process still make the difference as to whether the return on investment truly pays off. for this, and will move toward businesses in their supply chain that can provide them the fastest service, and that can do so error-free.

The warehouse operation plays a huge role in providing this business value. Consequently, the effectiveness of the warehouse manager also plays into that equation. That’s because the manager’s leadership personality drives employee engagement. A barking, grumpy, demeaning, unpleasant boss can negatively impact other employees and thus affect the entire business operation. So despite a company’s investment in technology, an ineffective manager can defeat the potential value of any technology investment.

ENGAGEMENT VS. ENRAGEMENT

I have many examples of working with managers who possessed excellent business knowledge, but who also exhibited less-than-desirable leadership and communications habits. When I worked with those managers through the survey feedback process to reveal how those habits were holding the operation back, many were able to make changes to their communication personality habits. You could see how employees responded positively when that happened, and they became eager to engage and improve performance.

Employee engagement, not employee enragement, is the key to providing the value your chosen customers want — net speed.

HELP THROUGH AWARENESS

There are many ways to find help for businesses that may be faced with this type of issue. Leadership, as expressed through communication style, is an important module in my Business Skills and Leadership Training Workshops. During those sessions, I share with managers the feedback received from the employees they supervise and from others who work around them.

When managers understand how their communication style is perceived, the reality is so stark that participants sometimes are initially in a state of denial. They often are surprised about how observant others are regarding this issue and how such communication facets can negatively impact the business. I’ve found that awareness is a big first step to improve leadership personality.

Spring 2016

The issue of “the boss’s” leadership personality habits so greatly impacts the behavior of other employees that I was motivated to find ways to help managers understand this impact.

I strived to illustrate the behaviors through a mechanism that not only provided self-awareness, but also served as a learning tool. The techniques also had to be strictly confidential.

FEEDBACK TOOL

Consequently, I designed that tool, an online survey that I call the “ME 124.” The ME 124 is a personality habits feedback instrument created as a personal and private insight tool for managers. The results of this survey outcome help managers understand the many varied personality habits or traits that may be getting in the way of his or her leadership effectiveness.

The ME 124 survey tool contains 124 questions. It provides feedback in several critical leadership domains. These include anger management, stress, dominance, aggressiveness, ambition and communication skills. The survey tool was developed in collaboration with Salvatore V. Didato, Ph.D. He is a clinical psychologist and an award-winning television, newspaper, and radio commentator on topics of human affairs. The domain analysis was adapted by permission of the author from The Big Book of Personality Tests, by Didato.

In addition to being confidential, the online survey’s color-coded scoring provides insights and comments regarding each type of personality habit. The scoring then illustrates how those habits can affect employee engagement and leadership effectiveness.

If the leadership skills and personality habits of your warehouse manager—and other employee leaders in your company—are an important factor in providing “net speed” success in your business, this process should provide you with an interesting, enlightening, proactive management tool.

More information about and access to the ME 124 survey are available at jimambroseworkshops.com. Interested participants can take the ME 124 communication style survey for free. The results are strictly confidential. You can print them out if you want to share them with others, but that step is up to you.

You can access the ME 124 survey instrument at: www.jimambrose-workshop.com

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Technology

Here’s What’s ‘App-ening’

Ten Mobile Tools to Use as You Head to the SMC – and After by diane stirling , senior editor

If you’re like many smart and successful business people (and the go-getters in the gases and welding industry), your tablet or your smartphone goes everywhere you go. Making the most of your day and maximizing your business through technology is a must-do for businesspeople today.

There are thousands of apps available — and thousands more on the horizon. These innovations can help you work remotely, keep up with the office (and friends and family), creatively use wait-time and add fun, ease and entertainment value to your leisure hours.

Consider downloading the following apps. They can help you plan your trip to Savannah, manage your travel, enjoy your free time and be useful long afterward, too. Look for more app suggestions in future issues of Welding and Gases Today. “What’s App-ening” is a regularly planned new feature brought to you by the magazine’s always app-discovering staff.

If you’ve got a favorite app you’d like to pass along to other GAWDA members, send the information our way for consideration for use in a future issue. Call us at (315) 445-2347; email us at editor@datakey.org; or tweet us at @WeldGasToday!

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Spring 2016

Technology

BUSINESS APPS Provides: An online project management and collaboration tool, the app provides a centralized digital workspace where teams can pull their separate components together online to “divvy up work, hash things out quickly, make big announcements, keep discussions on topic, store and organize key files and assets, lay out milestones and deadlines, and have regular check-ins to make sure everything’s all right.”

www.basecamp.com

Cost: Basecamp For Us: $29 a month, no per-user fees Basecamp With Clients: $79 per month, no per-user fees Basecamp Big: $3,000 per year (enterprise-level plan)

Provides: The app for those who want “Expense Reports That Don’t Suck!”

Easy mobile personal and business expense reporting and tracking. Expensify lets users add cash expenses, import card transactions, capture and assign client- or account-coded mileage, time and other reimbursable and billable expenses. It provides for basic expense approval and online reimbursement.

It syncs with QuickBooks, Xero, email and chat support.

Cost: Monthly-payment pricing: Team: $5.00 Corporate: $9.00

Enterprise-level: customized pricing Free 30-day trial

www.expensify.com

Provides: A note-taking app that clips, saves and organizes anything — text, images, audio, or a mixture — then saves them into searchable notebooks.

Accepts writing in many forms; clips notes, articles and photos; lets you share in real-time with anyone, anywhere through the app; and creates fast, efficient and attractive presentations.

www.evernote.com

Cost: B asic: free Plus, with more uploads and more options: $24.99 per month Premium: $49.99 a month

TRAVEL APPS Provides: Check your flight — or the one your business partner or family member is on — right now, next week, or whenever. Flight Status tracks trips by flight number, route, and airport.

The app also offers information about delays and cancellations, shows flight maps and layouts of airports worldwide and lets you check on terminal, gate and baggage-claim statuses. You also can view live weather radar maps, get updates on hotels, rental cars and parking, and manage your itinerary.

Cost: $4.99 (and up) Spring 2016

Flight Status www.flightstatus.us 53

Technology

Provides: Called “the first door-to-door solution for a traveler on their day-of travel.”

Gate Guru www.gateguru.com

Get day-of-travel itineraries with real-time updates on security wait times, flight delays, gate changes and layover time adjustments. See detailed airport amenity information, obtain rental car information and collect your travel statistics.

Cost: Free

Provides: You’re in a city you haven’t been to before, and you need to find… an ATM…a drugstore…a barbershop…a good deli. How do you do that when you’ve just stepped off the plane?

After identifying your location, the app offers information about the nearest local amenities, no matter where you are. It points the way to banks, bars, gas stations, grocery stores, hospitals, movie theaters, restaurants, markets and so on by offering a full list of the businesses nearby in a specific category.

It then shows the locations on a map, the distance to each and the route for arriving at the destinations.

Cost: Free

AroundMe www.aroundmeapp.com

LIFE CYCLE

TRACKING FOR ★ FOR ★

CYLINDERS Track All Your Important Assets • Meet FDA Requirements with Lot Number Tracking • Digital Proof of Delivery • Turn by Turn Directions • Routing Assistance • Latest iPhone Technology • Use Barcodes or RFID Tags A Product of

www.dataweld.com

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Spring 2016

Technology

LEISURE APPS

www.opentable.com

Provides: The world’s leading provider of online restaurant reservations connects restaurants and diners, so guests see which restaurants have available tables, and helps them select and book a meal out based on reviews and menus. For restaurants, the app helps manage reservations, streamline operations and enhance service levels. The app notes that since 1998, it has seated more than 940 million diners around the world.

Cost: Free

Provides: This golf GPS indicator and digital scorecard app provides “an accurate, reliable, free golf GPS range finder and scorecard.” It gives users a GPS rangefinder that determines the distance to the center of the green while pointing out all course obstacles as well as including wind speed, elevation, distances and offering club recommendations.

www.swingbyswing.com

Cost: Free

Mastermind Board Game

Swing By Swing

Provides: A classic board game experience offers the challenge of solving logic puzzles, letting you enjoy a game while exercising your mind. Players get eight attempts to crack the code. They’re awarded points when they guess colors right and bonus points for cracking the code. A mobile and tablet version of one of the most famous classical board games, this is designed for both adults and kids.

Cost: Free

Provides: A simple and convenient way to see what’s available for shows, concerts, games, and other venues; find seats and buy tickets; and even sell them if it turns out that you can’t attend.

The app also will send event recommendations based on your interests, and you can get notifications when teams, bands, and shows you like are coming to your area or are nearby.

Cost: Free

www.stubhub.com

All the apps mentioned are available on the App Store and on Google Play

Spring 2016

55

It only takes one leak to compromise your operations.

For over a century, CPV Manufacturing has provided safe and reliable valves and fittings worldwide. With state-of-the-art design, quality control, and attention to service, CPV Manufacturing provides assurance that valves and fittings fit perfectly, function effectively, and provide years of trouble-free service.

Don’t put your plant or facility at risk. Count on the valves and fittings that provide safe and reliable performance for your daily operations. Put the CPV trusted brand to work for you.

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2016 SPRING MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE

Disruption + GAWDA Event = Opportunity by carole jesiolowski, contributing editor

S

ometimes our business practices need a remodel, a change in practice, a disruption. GAWDA meetings are a safe place to get that information and that is one of the reasons Distributors and Suppliers attend them… in addition to the many opportunities available to network with colleagues and hear world-class business, industry and motivational speakers.

Disruption in business is nothing new. GAWDA members have been challenging the status quo for decades to find ways to improve their businesses. Here, Distributors and Suppliers share a take-away from something learned at a GAWDA event that made a difference for them…and say, if given the chance, what they would ask a keynote speaker.

“A core group from Earlbeck Gases routinely attends the SMC to exchange ideas with vendors and fellow distributors on ways to strengthen business. This group includes our sales manager, two staff members being groomed for upper management and myself. Other staff members, typically from the sales, finance and operations departments, are rotated through on a yearly basis. We’ve implemented a number of things learned at GAWDA meetings. In 2015, we began a “Perfect Order” quality control program that has identified problems we were not even aware that we had. We are always asking speakers their thoughts on where the industry is headed, what might change in the future and how to do things better. We frequently call the speaker after the meeting to deepen our understanding of their subject matter.”

“Networking with distributors and vendors gives us insight on what other distributors are doing in order to be more successful, and what vendors are doing with new products and promotions. I attended my first event in 2015, which was a great networking venture that helped me put names to faces and products to those names. I have a gas background, so the hardgoods aspect of our industry was where I needed to learn and grow, and attending the GAWDA event helped me do that.”

JOSH WEINMANN Vice President Delille Oxygen Company

“Talking with other distributors at the SMC, hearing how they do business and the solutions they bring to challenges are always a highlight for me. I’ve learned many things that were implemented at WISCO, which resulted in a better way of doing things. Many years ago, a distributor gave a presentation on what he called “the uncut diamond.” Controversial at the time, it caused quite a stir among attendees, who talked about it for several days throughout the conference. Today, a monthly cylinder rental fee, rather than demurrage, is standard practice.

The system was so much simpler and increased our profits by 20 percent. We moved into it more quickly because of this speaker’s presentation and the opportunity to talk about it with industry colleagues.”

JIM EARLBECK

ROGER YACKEY

President Earlbeck Gases & Technologies

Vice President Welding Industrial Supply Company

Spring 2016

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2016 SPRING MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE “The SMC is an opportunity for me to network and meet with suppliers, distributors and old friends. Sales opportunities lead to ongoing business, and there is always something to learn, such as new innovations and new technologies for our business and the overall industry. I want a speaker to address these latest innovations, and would find exposure and information tours to new industries interesting, i.e., a trading floor in New York, Chicago, even Houston; a new steel mill, factory, chemical or pharmaceutical plant utilizing the most technologically advanced methods; an electronics factory or R&D facility; shipping terminals, export/import docks, etc.”

ASHLEY MADRAY Executive Vice President Gas Innovations

“We’ve changed some paperwork flows and accuracies based on information received at a GAWDA event. We’ve also learned about different tracking methods for company assets, trucks, people and tanks, as well as recruiting and retaining people. I attend the SMC to hear about industry trends, learn best practices, and network. I’d ask a speaker to address how independent distributors can compete with the growing consolidation among distributors, as well as ways to handle the national coverage now required by merged customers.”

DEAN KIFFMEYER Vice President of Operations Central McGowan Inc.

“The GAWDA SMC offers us networking opportunities and the opportunity to keep up with what’s happening in our industry.

DOT, OSHA and EPA regulations are cumbersome and constantly changing, and having the GAWDA Consultants on-site to address questions about compliance is helpful. I’m curious to know what a speaker thinks how the outcome of the upcoming presidential election will impact our industry and our small businesses.”

JUDY MILLER Director of Marketing Wesco Gas & Welding Supply

“There are always great takeaways from the SMC. I attend the SMC to network and hear other distributors’ best practices and see if they would fit our business model. We are in a day where superior customer service is expected, and I always appreciate presentations on how to serve the customer, how to go to the next level. I’d ask a speaker to address the increase of the “Big Box Industrial Guys” getting involved in our bucket, i.e. welding supplies.”

TIMM EVANS Vice President of Sales Cee Kay Supply

“Attending the SMC has become a tradition for me. Being part of the GAWDA family brings trust and confidence in the products I provide and sell. I’d ask a speaker to address equipment safety, particularly regarding the certifications to ensure safety as regards knock-offs and OEM copies.”

ANDREAS WILLFORT “I attend the SMC with our distributor sales team, plus three managers. We look forward to networking, updating distributors and in face-to-face meetings. I’ve gotten ideas on benchmarking, assessing customer satisfaction and specific regulatory issues. I want specific comments on the economy, political environment and industry trends in terms of application areas. I’d ask any speaker what threats they see in business that would impact distributors.

I expect an industry CEO to answer questions just as they do at Investor Day presentations.”

BOB VAN KIRK Head of Key Customers & Distributors, Linde

Spring 2016

General Manager WEH Technologies Inc.

“I attend the SMC to participate not only in the Contact Booth Program so we can show our latest products to customers, but also to participate in GAWDA Committee meetings. I continue to learn how to navigate our changing marketplace. Based on a speaker’s expertise, I would like to know their predictions on how the economy will react in this election year, and what a Democrat or Republican president would mean for the future of the economy.”

JIM HERRING Vice President Saf T Cart 59

2016 SPRING MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE

Disruption: threats and opportunities

SCHEDULE, EVENT AND SPEAKER HIGHLIGHTS SUNDAY, APRIL 3 8:00 am - 6:00 pm

Conference Registration

Savannah Convention Center

8:00 am - 9:00 am

Executive Committee

Savannah Convention Center

9:00 am - 12:00 pm Board of Directors Meeting

Savannah Convention Center

2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Committee Meetings

Savannah Convention Center

4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

First Timers’ Reception

Westin Savannah Resort

Welcome, all First-Time Attendees of the Spring Management Conference!

You are invited to attend a special reception hosted by GAWDA President Bill Visintainer. The reception is hosted in an intimate setting with GAWDA leadership, staff and committee members in attendance. We look forward to welcoming you to your first GAWDA SMC. Attire: Business Casual 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm

President’s Welcome Reception

Westin Savannah Resort

GAWDA President Bill Visintainer welcomes all members to the 2016 Spring Management Conference in Savannah. Kick off the Conference by mingling with colleagues and friends. The Welcome Reception will be hosted at the Westin Savannah Resort, in the Harbor A & B Ballroom and Lawn areas. Hors d’oeuvres and drinks will be served. Comfortable shoes are recommended.

Attire: Business Casual MONDAY, APRIL 4 7:00 am - 5:00 pm

Conference Registration

Savannah Convention Center

7:00 am - 8:00 am

Breakfast Workshop

Savannah Convention Center

Panel Discussion: “Generation Next: The Most Disruptive Generation Ever” Join us for breakfast to learn more about “The Most Disruptive Generation Ever.” George Ratermann, president of Ratermann Manufacturing (Livermore, California and Nashville, Tennessee), leads a discussion about ‘Generation Next’ and presents a closer look at the unique behaviors and abilities of this generation. We’ll strive to understand the next generation of leaders, customers and employees; how their approach to business is different; and to combine the new generation’s strategy to advance our industry and your company.

Attire: Business Casual 60

Spring 2016

2016 SPRING MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE

SUNDAY, APRIL 3– TUESDAY, APRIL 5 The Westin Savannah Harbor Golf Resort & Spa 1 Resort Drive Savannah, GA 31421

MONDAY, APRIL 4 CONTINUED 8:15 am - 12:00 pm General Business Session

Savannah Convention Center

Speaker: Dirk Beveridge “INNOVATE: How Successful Businesses Lead Change in Disruptive Times” Most businesses agree that they must reinvent their business before someone else does. But, as you continue to operate the business for today, how can you unleash the spirit of innovation to create a relevant, stronger, and more profitable future?

In this session, you will explore “The Innovative Distributor framework” that provides practical lessons for creating transformative change—no matter the industry— with Dirk Beveridge, the industry’s leading advocate of change and innovation. Dirk “gets it” and helps your people not only “get it,” but leave with a roadmap for jump-starting innovation.

Speaker: Steven B. Wiley “Transformational Journey from Gettysburg” He’s one of the nation’s most sought-after performance coaches. His business experience includes the founding of two international franchise organizations and a national chain of fleet management centers, plus negotiating multimillion-dollar funding agreements with some of the world’s top venture capital organizations. Steven Wiley brings his wealth of knowledge in the areas of leadership development, marketing negotiation, and sales and business development to his audiences.

Attire: Business Casual 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Group Lunch

Spring 2016

Savannah Convention Center

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2016 SPRING MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE

MONDAY, APRIL 4 CONTINUED 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Women of Gases and Welding Luncheon

Savannah Convention Center

Speaker: Marjorie Young “Strategies to Boost Your Professional Reputation” Savannah public relations entrepreneur Marjorie Young is a leading brandbuilder and communications strategist who advises some of the most respected local figures in business, real estate and entertainment. She has lectured across the country, holding frequent bootcamps and webinars to guide and empower business owners and non-profit organizations on how to take control of their public relations, brand and messaging. Ms. Young has received numerous awards, including the Savannah Morning News’ Savannah’s Community Star; 2013 Small Business of the Year; and finalist standing as a Georgia Woman Entrepreneur

by The University of Georgia. She is also the co-author of Women in Suits.

Note: the luncheon is free, but signup is required. Email jarias@gawda.org to confirm attendance.

1:00 pm - 4:30 pm

Contact Booth Program

Savannah Convention Center

This year’s Contact Booth Program will be held at the Savannah Convention Center, where there is more than 40,000 square feet of space to fully accommodate all program booth exhibitors and participants. The program is highlighted this year by a special Prize Program Giveaway. Thousands of dollars worth of prizes will be awarded to attending Distributor Members. Be sure to get your tickets for a chance to win. Beer and wine will be served.

Industry Hospitality Events

4:30 pm

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Spring 2016

2016 SMC

Discover the advantages of DON’T MISS THIS! Don’t miss this new SMC twist! To boost exhibit excitement and increase the level of networking opportunities for vendor suppliers and distributor members, GAWDA is presenting a new Prize Program and adding enhancements to the exhibit space at this year’s SMC Contact Booth Program.

PRIZE PROGRAM More than $10,000 in great prizes will be awarded at the end of the event. (Prizes are being generously contributed by vendors, and GAWDA has contributed $5,000 worth of awards as well, to attract extra interest.)

The Platinum Distributor Program by American Torch Tip

✔ Exclusive Membership ✔ Select Pricing ✔ Generous Rebate Programs ✔ Liberal Return Policy ✔ Exceptional Promotions ✔ Stellar Customer Service

Vendors will have raffle tickets available to hand out to distributors who visit their show booths during show hours (1:00 – 4:30 pm on Monday, April 4). Distributors: be sure to get around to visit as many vendor booths as you can to increase your chances of prize winning!

At the end of the show, raffle tickets will be drawn to award the prizes. Winners must be present at the drawing when prizes are announced in order to claim the prize at vendor booths.

ADDED FLOOR SPACE To provide more value to Supplier members of GAWDA, enhancements have been made to the booth program.

Anchor exhibitor booths will be situated at each corner of the floor to promote more traffic flow to the booths in those areas.

This year’s program also features an enhanced layout that dedicates

Call ATTC Sales Director Jack McCulloch at 941-753-7557, ext. 101 to find out how your company can become an ATTC Platinum Distributor today.

more than twice the usual amount of floor space to the booth program. An enhanced floor plan also will provide more space and opportunity for vendors to connect with potential and

AmericanTorchTip.com

existing customers.

Spring 2016

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2016 SPRING MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE

TUESDAY, APRIL 5 7:00 am

- 1:00 pm

Conference Registration

Savannah Convention Center

7:00 am

- 8:00 am

Networking Breakfast

Savannah Convention Center

8:00 am

- 11:30 am

General Business Session

Savannah Convention Center

Speaker: Dr. Thomas DeCarlo Topic: “Understanding Your Customer: The More You Know, The More Sales Grow” The Ben S. Weil Endowed Chair of Industrial Distribution at the Charles and Patsy Collat School of Business at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Dr. DeCarlo is a returning SMC presenter. As a professor of marketing At UAB, he conducts seminars and research projects dealing with new product development, market analysis and segmentation, sales force and brand management. Dr. DeCarlo has conducted two surveys for GAWDA, one that assesses services and programs the association provides, and a second that offers distributors ways to discover more about satisfying customer needs and interests.

He will present highlights of those surveys along with his insights and analysis.

Panel Discussion: “Disruption: Recognize It, Understand It, Mitigate It, Thrive Through It” Hear from five experienced supply chain veterans who have thrived through many industrydisruptive events, and who are prepared to help you tackle the next wave on the horizon. They will address the topics of: identifying issues that can be managed; comparing the gases and welding channel with other industrial sectors; disruptions in the hardgoods and equipment supply chain; gases segment disruptions; do-able remedies in the hardgoods and gases segments; and profit measurement and improvement tools. A question-answer session follows.

Panelists: John (J.R.“Buzz”) Campbell, consultant at Leaders LLC, and founder of J.R. Campbell & Associates, Inc. Kenneth Thompson, principal, Thompson Group (Woodstock, Georgia) Jim Earlbeck, president, Earlbeck Gases & Technologies (Baltimore, Maryland) David Manthey, Managing Director, Robert W. Baird & Co. Michael A. Masha, Managing Director, Masha Capital Management

12:00 pm

- 5:00 pm

Golf Tournament

Westin Savannah Resort

This year’s golf tournament will be hosted at the Westin Savannah’s course, The Club at Savannah Harbor, home of the PGA TOUR Champions Tour Liberty Mutual Insurance Legends of Golf tournament. This 18-hole course offers excitement for both novice and experienced players.

Golf rentals are available. Payment should be included on the submitted Attendee Registration Forms.

Pairing requests can be sent to golf chair Bruce Ellenbogen at bellenbogen@gawda.org.

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Spring 2016

2016 SPRING MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE

Meet Your SMC Speakers, Panelists and Discussion Leaders DIRK BEVERIDGE “INNOVATE: How Successful Businesses Lead Change in Disruptive Times” Dirk Beveridge delivers a new voice, a new energy, and a new outlook in the field of wholesale distribution as he speaks about innovation, business strategy, sales and leadership, providing his original, proven, and often disruptive thinking. With an infectious energy and passion for excellence, he inspires audiences to step out from their comfort zones to unleash–and embrace–change.

For over 25 years as a consultant to a wide range of businesses, Beveridge has helped leading firms align, focus, and strengthen their sales and leadership strategies to remain relevant, outperform the market, and provide deeper value to customers. Today, his company is one of the leading providers of employee development and sales empowerment systems to distribution companies and their suppliers worldwide. He also has authored a best-selling book, INNOVATE! How Successful Distributors Lead Change In Disruptive Times.

Believing that innovation was bypassing distributors, Beveridge in 2012 founded UnleashWD, a business summit for wholesalers, distributors and their channel partners, where speakers from all corners of the world join with business leaders for inspirational stories of discovery, challenge and transformation.

Spring 2016

STEVEN B. WILEY “Transformational Journey from Gettysburg” One of the nation’s most sought-after performance coaches, Steven Wiley’s business experience includes the founding of two international franchise organizations and a national chain of fleet management centers. He also has negotiated multi-million-dollar funding agreements with some of the world’s top venture capital organizations.

In addition, Wiley is a highly acclaimed speaker who has influenced and entertained tens of thousands of top executives from around the world, bringing a wealth of knowledge in the areas of leadership development, marketing negotiation, and sales and business development to audiences.

As president of the Lincoln Leadership Institute at Gettysburg and founder of the Institute’s Communication with Executive Presence program, he has earned raves and recognition in top publications, including Venture magazine, USA Today, and Entrepreneur magazine.

GEORGE RATERMANN Panel Leader George Ratermann started working in the gases and welding industry in 1977. He owned and operated a 65

2016 SPRING MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE gas distributor, specialty gas and welding supply operation in Northern California’s Silicon Valley for many years before forming Ratermann Manufacturing. The company develops innovative products and distributes top quality brands for the beverage, cryogenic, fill plant, medical, specialty gas and LNG markets.

With four children and many employees in the “Generation Next” category, Ratermann will provide his experience working with and benefitting along with this unique demographic group.

MARJORIE YOUNG “Strategies to Boost Your Professional Reputation” Marjorie Young is an entrepreneur who serves and advises some of the most respected local figures in business, real estate, and entertainment through her public relations agency, Carriage Trade Public Relations.

She creates and executes digital communication programs for visibility and reputation management in the community and globally online, and has been an innovator in the creation of local news and publications services. She has lectured across the country, holding bootcamps and webinars to guide and empower business owners and non-profit organizations on how to take control of their public relations, brand and messaging.

Marjorie also has received numerous awards, including the Savannah Morning News’ Savannah’s Community Star; 2013 Small Business of the Year; and was a finalist as a Georgia Woman Entrepreneur by The University of Georgia. She is also the co-author of Women in Suits.

THOMAS DECARLO, PH.D. “Understanding Your Customer: The More You Know, The More Sales Grow” Affiliated with the Charles and Patsy Collat Industrial Distribution Program at the Collat School of Business at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Dr. Thomas DeCarlo serves as the program’s Ben S. Weil Endowed Chair of Industrial Distribution.

The Collat program is one of a small number of programs in the world offering a joint engineering and business program that prepares graduates for sales, marketing and purchasing positions in industrial firms.

DeCarlo teaches courses in distribution policies and distribution management, and leads the practicum in distribution studies. He also has taught in executive MBA programs in China, the Iowa State University and the University of Georgia, 66

and has conducted a number of seminars and research projects dealing with new product development, market analysis and segmentation. His research has focused on brand management and strategic issues in selling and sales-force management, customer relationship management and marketing communications.

PANEL DISCUSSION “Disruption: Recognize It, Understand It, Mitigate It, Thrive Through It” Discussion leaders: Ken Thompson and J.R. “Buzz” Campbell Ken Thompson has been an Association Member since 1960, beginning his career in the then-newly formed Distributor Products Department of Union Carbide Corporation’s Linde Division. He has been in roles in distributor and packaged gases throughout his career, serving in executive and principal ownership positions in gases manufacturing, wholesale and retail distribution. He has represented the Buying & Information Group as their facilitator for the past 20 years, as well as serving on various industry advisory boards.

Thompson has advanced degrees in business and served as an anti-submarine warfare officer in the U. S. Navy. In addition, Ken founded and is the principal in The Southeastern Junior Golf Tour, and was an instructor in pre-hospital medicine and trauma at the University of Alabama, Birmingham Medical Centers. He has volunteered in his community as a fire rescue services paramedic for over 30 years.

J.R. “Buzz” Campbell is considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on the industrial gas and cryogenic industry.

His career, which spans six decades, began in 1962 with Air Products and chemicals. He then worked with Burdox, Inc. as EVP and COO, where he was instrumental in its sale to what is now Linde AG. He began J.R. Campbell & Associates in 1981, providing marketing and strategy consulting services to U.S. and international businesses. Buzz joined Leaders LLC, a mergers and acquisitions firm, in 2002. For many years, he published a well-known industry journal and has served on numerous academic and business committees, including a committee of the National Academy of Sciences.

Jim Earlbeck, president of Earlbeck Gases and Technologies, learned to weld at the Hobart School of Welding Technology while in high school. After graduating from the University of Maryland’s Mechanical Engineering program in 1977, he became vice president of family-owned Earlbeck Gases & Technologies.

Earlbeck is now introducing the third generation, daughter Allison, into the business.

A member of the AWS, Earlbeck teaches welding at the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, and the Spring 2016

2016 SMC DISCUSSION PANELISTS

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U.S. Naval Academy. He is a past president of the American Welding Society Maryland Section, a recipient of the American Welding Society’s “Distinguished Member” award and a recipient of Anne Arundel Community College’s “Excellence in Education” award.

David Manthey is managing partner and senior analyst covering Industrial Distribution & Services at Robert W. Baird, Inc. Prior to joining Baird in 1995, he worked at Strong/Corneliuson Capital Management.

In 2014, Manthey was ranked by StarMine as the No. 3 earnings estimator in Trading Companies & Distributors. In both 2013 and 2012, he was ranked by StarMine as the No. 1 stock picker in Trading Companies & Distributors, and in 2012, as the No. 3 stock picker in Commercial Services & Supplies. In 2011, he was ranked No. 3 in The Wall Street Journal’s “Best on the Street” survey.

A CompTIA Network+ certified professional, he was named one of the top 10 analysts in the Reuters Survey’s Industrial and IT categories in 1998, and in the Computers category in 2000. The surveys evaluated research coverage of small- to mid-cap companies. Manthey earned a BS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA from Indiana University, with a major in Finance and a minor in Management Information Systems.

Michael A. Masha has more than 35 years of diversified experience in executive finance, accounting and general management positions. Most recently, he served as chief financial officer of GTS-Welco, an independent industrial gas distributor in the Mid-Atlantic region, until the successful sale of the business to Praxair Inc. Prior to that, Masha was chief financial officer of MG Industries, the US operations arm of the Messer Group, a German industrial gas manufacturer and distributor.

During his career, Masha has been responsible for leading business development and strategic planning projects, acquisitions and divestitures, business restructuring, corporate finance and treasury, information systems, and productivity and profitability improvement projects. He holds an MBA from the University of Michigan.

ü Profitable sales ü Excellent quality and service ü Strong brand preference ü Most complete ü On-time delivery product line

p

David Manthey

1/4” I.D. x 150’ T-1225-04-100T

T grade hose included

p

Jim Earlbeck

Most Robust

1/4” I.D. x 100’ TW84100 OLPT

www.reelcraft.com

800-444-3134 67

EXHIBITORS GUIDE

SMC2016

Guide to Contact Booth Exhibitors It’s 2016…it’s Spring…and it’s Savannah!

That means the distributor and supplier members of the Gases and Welding Distributors Association are ready for the annual Spring Management Conference.

Photo Credit Georgia Department of Economic Development

As always, distributor and supplier members attend this event to renew ties and strengthen relationships; learn about new products and policies; and discover the latest news about fellow members.

A new twist this year is an expanded Contact Booth exhibit hall event highlighted by a Prize Program. So make sure you visit the exhibitors listed on the next pages in order to get in on all the fun!

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Spring 2016

EXHIBITORS GUIDE

ABICOR BINZEL

ACME CRYOGENICS

ABICOR BINZEL INCORPORATES QUALITY AND TECHNOLOGY FOR OPTIMUM PERFORMANCE

ALM POSITIONERS IMPROVE PRODUCTIVITY, THROUGHPUT AND SAFETY

Frederick, Maryland — Our torches have been developed to the last detail and assure precise and comfortable work. RAB Grip TA torch is an example of BINZEL’s efforts to remain at the forefront of technology with regard to the industry’s environmental and ergonomic needs.

Rock Island, Illinois — ALM Positioners’ single-column positioners have capacities of up to 10,000 pounds and two-column capacities from 8,000 to 75,000 pounds.

Available in 208/230/460 VAC 3 phase with optional electrical service. An electro-hydraulic system requires no special foundation. ALM’s unique positioner designs have proven to be more cost effective by improving safety for welder and operator, improving weld quality and boosting production throughput as much as 35 percent.

ACME CRYOGENICS FINAL LINE MANIFOLDS Allentown, Pennsylvania — Acme Cryogenics is a leading designer and manufacturer of final line pressure control manifolds. Their time-proven brazing, cleaning and testing procedures provide superior results that cannot be matched by any other manufacturer’s process. Let Acme show you the difference!

AIWD HAS BEEN THERE FOR OVER 16 YEARS Overland Park, Kansas — AIWD has been the best buying group choice for independently owned industrial gas/welding supply distributors and C02 beverage carbonation service companies. This has been accomplished by providing tremendous financial value for members; by helping independents remain independent, and by providing an extended family for members and vendors to thrive within. Contact Ron Weldon for information — 913-963-9135.

ALM POSITIONERS

AMERICAN STANDARD MANUFACTURING PROVIDING OVER 25 YEARS OF EXCELLENCE Central Bridge, New York — ASM has provided over 25 years of excellent customer service and outstanding product quality. They continue to manufacture high-pressure and propane cylinder storage and merchandising cabinets for both industrial and commercial use, along with a variety of ergonomic cylinder-handling devices.

AMERICAN TORCH TIP PLATINUM DISTRIBUTOR PROGRAM Bradenton, Florida — ATTC’s Platinum program offers a wide range of incentives and promotions across five welding and cutting platforms. Platinum Distributors enjoy select pricing, generous rebates, liberal return policies and stellar customer service. Call ATTC Sales Director Jack McCulloch at 941 753-7557, ext. 101 to discover how your company can become an ATTC Platinum Distributor.

AMERICAN STANDARD MANUFACTURING

Spring 2016

AMERICAN TORCH TIP 69

EXHIBITORS GUIDE

APPLIED CRYO

AMWINS

AMWINS HAS DELIVERED FOR OVER 24 YEARS

ARCOS SHOWCASES LINE

Charlotte, North Carolina — Welding supply distributors have entrusted their insurance coverage to AmWINS Program Underwriters for over 24 years. With specialized coverages, strong claims management and competitive pricing, you cannot afford not to ask your agent about AmWINS. Talk with AmWINS executives about how your business can benefit from AmWINS Program Underwriters.

Mt. Carmel, Pennsylvania — Arcos Industries, LLC manufactures a comprehensive line of superior quality bare wire, covered and tubular welding electrode products. Our wide range of consumables includes high alloy, stainless steel and nickel alloy electrodes. Arcos electrodes meet or exceed demanding military and nuclear application specifications such as: ASME Nuclear Certificate #QSC448; ISO 9001: Certified; Mil-I 45208A Inspection; and Navy QPL.

ANOTHY WELDED PRODUCTS LOAD-N-ROLL SERIES CARTS

BTIC AMERICA OFFERING INDUSTRIAL AND BEVERAGE CRYOGENIC CYLINDERS

Delano, California — Anthony is excited to attend another GAWDA SMC with a couple of cutting-edge products to show, one of which is the new patented Load-N-Roll cart line. This four-wheel design revolutionizes the way cylinders are handled. Scan the QR code above for a quick video about the Load-N-Roll series carts.

APPLIED CRYO TECHNOLOGIES SHOWCASES OPTIMIZED ALUMINUM TRAILERS Houston, Texas – Applied Cryo Technologies specializes in the design and manufacturing of vacuum-insulated, cryogenic containers used in the distribution and transportation of industrial gases. With Optimized Aluminum Trailers rolling off the line in late 2015, ACT continues to raise the bar, bringing innovative and client-focused products to the industrial gas market.

ARCOS

BTIC

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Houston, Texas — BTIC America Corporation is now offering Industrial and Beverage Cryogenic Cylinders to gas distributors in North America.

Industrial Cylinders (DOT/TC) available in sizes from 180HP to 265HP in (350 PSI) and 200VHP in (500 PSI). Beverage Cylinders (ASME) in sizes from BC300 to BC750. Protect your investment with the most durable cylinders available.

BUG-O SYSTEMS NEW GO-FER IV Canonsburg, Pennsylvania — Manufacturing in the United States since 1948, Bug-O Systems continues as the world leader in design and manufacture of track, automation and motion control for arc welding and cutting. Visit our booth to see the New Go-fer IV — One Machine for All Applications! Learn how Bug-O increases your bottom line.

BUG-O Spring 2016

EXHIBITORS GUIDE

CARBORUNDUM ABRASIVES

CALIFORNIA CYLINDER PARTNERS FOR TESTING

CAVAGNA OFFERS ALL-IN-ONE PRODUCT VALVE

Upland, California — Family-owned California Cylinder carries a large inventory of high-pressure steel, aluminum and liquid bulk cylinders, propane tanks, valves and regulators. California Cylinder has partnered with a new hydro-test facility to better service their growing roster of high-pressure cylinder customers.

Somerset, New Jersey — Cavagna Group’s IVIPR is an integrated valve and residual pressure valve. Its ergonomic design provides the user with easy access to all primary functions from one side of the cylinder. IVPR is suitable for various welding gases, including oxygen, acetylene and AR/C02 mixtures.

CARBORUNDUM ABRASIVES: THE DEFINITION OF DIFFERENT

CGW SHOWCASES Z4 HIGH PERFORMANCE FLAP DISCS

Worcester, Massachusetts — Count on Carborundum Abrasives to make a profitable difference to your bottom line with our Carbo White standard tier line.

Carbo White delivers a better abrasive at a better value so you have a competitive advantage and your customers have a solution to meet their need without breaking the bank.

Niles, Illinois – CGW has expanded its extensive line of U.S.-made flap discs with the addition of Z4 Trimmable and Phenolic-backed flap discs. Made with concentrated grinding aid, high-performance zirconia alumina grain and long-lasting polyester, the new Z4 discs are ideal for severe applications when sharp edges are a challenge.

CATALINA CYLINDERS – WORLD-CLASS PRODUCTS, FIRST CLASS SERVICE

CHART NEW SOLUTIONS: DURA-CYL 7, ECONO-CYL, NOMAD, MVE LAB SERIES AND RESEARCH DEWARS

Garden Grove, California — Catalina Cylinders manufactures high- and low-pressure aluminum compressed gas cylinders for Specialty and Calibration Gas, Industrial Gas, Beverage, Medical, SCUBA, Fire & Rescue and Automotive (Nitrous). Catalina East additionally produces Technical Impacts. Catalina Composites (subsidiary) produces Type 3 CNG cylinders. Manufacturing locations in Garden Grove, California, and Hampton, Virginia.

Garfield Heights, Ohio — The Dura-Cyl Series is now available with a 7-year vacuum warranty with improved control regulators. The New Econo-Cyl Series features the Chart exclusive MCR regulator for easy in-field pressure adjustments. Our new Nomad 830G is perfect for the temporary gas or liquid jobs, or as a backup for liquid delivery. Now available from the industrial gas group is the MVE Lab Series and Research Dewars.

CAVAGNA

CGW

Spring 2016

CHART 71

Your Versatile Solution Introducing the Nomad™ 830G Mobile System

Innovative Design, Technology and Reliability Chart’s Nomad™ Mobile System offers a versatile solution for temporary gas applications and small liquid delivery requirements of oxygen, nitrogen or argon. The Nomad 830G MP system comes complete with a 4700 SCFH vaporizer, trailer and gas use connections for immediate use in a wide range of applications from construction welding jobs to pipe freezing, or as a backup delivery system.  Gross Capacity: 830 Gal / MAWP: 250 psig  High-Performance Pressure Builder & Ambient Vaporizer  Premium Quality Drop-Deck Felling® Trailer  Robust Field-Proven Internal Tank Support System All Stainless Steel Bottle Construction

chartindustries.com 1-800-400-4683

www.

Visit us online

or contact us to learn more.

EXHIBITORS GUIDE

CTR INC.

CYL-TEC

CTR INC. SHINES SPOTLIGHT ON THEIR LIQUID CYLINDER POLISHER Rock Hill, South Carolina — CTR of the Carolinas Inc. has released their latest version of their Liquid Cylinder Polisher. It removes debris, scratches, and scuffs returning the cylinder back to like-new condition. It accommodates most standard cylinders. CTR Inc. has been a premier cryogenic provider for over 20 years.

DATAWELD

EVERGREEN MIDWEST ANNOUNCES NEW B TO B WEBSITE Mentor, Ohio — GAWDA vendor member Evergreen Midwest Inc., a wholesale distributor serving the compressed gas industry since 1978, announces a new B-to-B website. This will allow the customer to enter orders or check pricing at their convenience. After-hours ordering or determining your cost for a quote will be a snap. Visit booth 310 for more details, or sign up at www.evergreenmidwest.com.

CYL-TEC OFFERS CYLCONNECT TELEMETRY PLATFORM Aurora, Illinois — CylConnect provides a single platform to assure constant gas supply and lower cost through remote monitoring. Cyl-Connect uses the cellular network to provide multiple monitoring solutions for your high pressure, cryogenic, or bulk tank systems. Come see us to learn more!

DATAWELD OFFERS INDUSTRY-SPECIFIC SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS

Bossier City, Louisiana — DataWeld will demonstrate how you can use the latest iPhone technology to track cylinders and lot numbers for your medical and C0 2 cylinders. The iPhone lets you start tracking your assets with a product you may already be using and at a cost you might not have thought possible.

EVERGREEN

EXOCOR

Spring 2016

EXOCOR LOOKING TO PARTNER WITH DISTRIBUTORS Amherst, New York — Since 1997, Exocor has been a leading wholesaler of high performance welding filler metals and has recently extended its locations to better serve the U.S. Distribution market. Exocor has built its quality reputation on a superior product line, extensive inventory, competitive pricing, industry leading technical knowledge and excellent service support.

FASTEST INTRODUCES SMART TECHNOLOGY FOR GAS FILL CONNECTORS Roseville, Minnesota — FasTest Inc. manufactures world class quick connections for filling industrial or medical oxygen gas cylinders. FasTest’s latest innovation – SMART Technology for gas fill connectors — is available to view at Booth 101! Verify your filling connection with FasTest’s revolutionary SMART Connection Verification technology!

FASTEST 73

EXHIBITORS GUIDE

GULLCO

THE HARRIS PRODUCTS GROUP

GULLCO INTERNATIONAL’S OSCILLATOR IMPROVES WELD QUALITY Cleveland, Ohio — The portable, compact, modular design of this heavy-duty remote control oscillator makes it easy to handle and set up, increases productivity and improves weld quality by providing precise automation of welding applications. Mounted on a KAT travel carriage, the oscillator imparts pendulum, tangential or step motion to the welding gun.

INOXCVA

KAPLAN INDUSTRIES PROVIDES TOTAL SOLUTIONS Harrison, Ohio — More than just an industrial cylinder supplier, Kaplan Industries offers a wide portfolio of services. Executives will discuss cylinder cradle manifold systems, liquid and propane offerings along with medical and beverage options. No one inventories a more complete line of cylinders and valves for compressed gases, offering both new and refurbished cylinders.

KOBELCO’S INNOVATIVE SPIRIT SUPPORTS NEW PRODUCT INTRODUCTION

THE HARRIS PRODUCTS GROUP Mason, Ohio —The Harris Products Group offers a full line of specialty gas equipment. We manufacture high purity barstock regulators available in stainless steel, brass and chrome plated. In addition to regulators, Harris offers complete gas management products for flow control, gas purification, and cylinder storage.

INOXCVA SHOWCASES MICRO-BULK STORAGE AND DISTRIBUTION PRODUCTS Baytown, Texas — The INOXCVA Portacryo combines all the features needed for cost-effective micro-bulk storage and distribution capabilities. Their team of experts will provide information needed to help the independent operator become more self-sufficient and profitable. Discounts on all cryogenic and micro-bulk storage equipment will be offered.

KOBELCO Spring 2016

Stafford, Texas — Kobelco Welding of America introduces the LP-XR series to their product line up. The LP-XR series is an all-position, stainless flux cored with reduced hexavalent CR production. With as much as 80 percent reduction in CR(VI), the LP-XR series leads to a safer work environment and facilitates meeting strict OSHA requirements.

THE LINCOLN ELECTRIC CO. WILL NETWORK WITH DISTRIBUTOR PARTNERS Cleveland, Ohio – With more than 200 technical representatives and field sales support personnel, Lincoln Electric strives to assist distributor partners as they meet end-user needs with application expertise, quality products and outstanding customer service.

THE LINCOLN ELECTRIC CO, 75

EXHIBITORS GUIDE

MCDANTIM

NORTON

MERCER

MCDANTIM SHOWCASES THE TRUMIX

FOR ALL IYNDUSTRY OUR GASES & WELDING NEEDS INDUSTRY NEEDS

C YCLYI N LD I NEDRESR S

1 Partner ##1 Solution ##1 Source 1 Partner 1 Solution 1ELDING Source FOR ALL YOUR GASES & W

# #

V AVLA VLEVSE S

11

# is Your # is Your

C RCYROYGOEGNEI C NIC H OHSOESSE& S P &API N AT I NST S

where you can sign up for online ordering www.EverGreenMidwest.com www.EverGreenMidwest.com

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A CACCECSESSOSROI E RS IES

EVERG EVERG GREEN REEN Midwest Midwest Midwest dwest Co. Co. EVERG EVER Mi Check out our brand new B2B Website

8976 Osborne Drive Mentor, OH 44060 8976 Osborne Drive Toll: 800.659.3358 Mentor, OH 44060 Phone: 440.255.5540 Toll: 800.659.3358 Fax: 440.255.5540 440.255.6434 Phone: Sales@emwco.com Fax: 440.255.6434 Sales@emwco.com

Helena, Montana — McDantim Trumix gas blending systems are a unique approach to accurate gas blends. Using laminar gas flow properties, they maintain industry standard blend accuracies over a wide range of flow rates without buffer tanks or electricity. Two or three-component blends at flow rates ranging from 1scfh to over 4,000 scfh are available.

MERCER INDUSTRIES PREMIUM WIRE WHEELS AND BRUSHES Ronkonkoma, New York — Mercer Industries proudly brings to market Premium Wire Wheels and Brushes.

Highest quality oil tempered steel wire provides long life and high resistance to breaking while zinc plated cups are rust resistant. These features and benefits lead to increased productivity and efficiency for the most discriminating customers.

NORTON, BECAUSE RIGHT CHOICES MATTER Duluth, Georgia —The unprecedented design of the all-new Norton Quantum3 grinding wheels deliver high operator comfort with faster cut, less grinding time and less downtime for relentless cutting action. The quality of your work is a reflection of you. And Norton wants to help you be the best in class; choose Quantum3.

Spring 2016

EXHIBITORS GUIDE Prism Visual Software

RAY MURRAY

PRISM VISUAL SOFTWARE SOLVING YOUR TECHNOLOGY NEEDS Port Washington, New York — Prism Visual Software sells desktop, e-commerce and mobile Android software to support a welding supply distributor’s end-to-end technology needs.

Prism Route Management Dispatch Suite sells with a fully integrated Accounting ERP or integrates with QuickBooks, Microsoft Dynamics and SAGE. Supports cylinder exchange and replenishment workflow.

ROTAREX

To Meet or Exceed the Most Rigorous Global Standards,

The Gas World Turns to

Weldship

Experience •Knowledge• Performance

RAY MURRAY INC. OFFERS PROTECTION C02 CYLINDERS Lee, Massachusetts — Ray Murray has introduced new flanged pressure retention valve for aluminum cylinders. It minimizes potential of cylinder contamination by preventing backflow of impurities by retaining approximately 50psi pressure, maintaining the integrity of the cylinder contents against contaminants, even if the valve is left open.

ROTAREX GAS HANDLING PROCESS Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania — Serving the industry since 1922, manufacturer of valves, fittings, and regulators for compressed gases.

Source-to-process solutions for the handling of gas including specialty, semiconductor, corrosive, industrial, and medical. Innovator for cylinder valves, line valves, integrated valve-regulators, regulators, and fittings in materials such as brass, ASB, stainless steel, nickel, and Hastelloy.

Tube Trailers, ISO-Containers, CO2 Transports, Ground Storage Modules

For superior product quality and performance, call on Weldship!

We have met virtually every global standard or code, and have the engineering, technical and manufacturing experience to assure you the right size and configuration for your gas product transports and containers.

Weldship is now ISO 9001 Certified.

All of our products are available for lease or purchase. In addition, we provide a complete testing service for required container certification.

Contact us today to keep your product safe, your fleet moving… and your profits rolling!

w w w. w e l d s h i p . c o m 225 West Second Street • Bethlehem, PA 18015 • P–610 861 7330 75 East Main Street • Westboro, MA 01581 • P–508 898 0100 1310 Highway 82 West • Gainesville, TX 76240 • P–940 668 1777

ISO 9001 CERTIFIED

Spring 2016

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EXHIBITORS GUIDE SAFTCART EXECS DISCUSS LATEST OFFERINGS Clarksdale, Mississippi — SafTCart will discuss their latest offerings including the all-electric EZ Load-4L, the Magnet Cart Line, the warehouse friendly Box Cart Line, and the all new Cradle Series, the EC6 and EC12.

Executives will be available to assist you in your complete operational needs including pallets, pallet beds and trailers.

SAFETCART

SELECT-ARC

SELECT-ARC SETS THE STANDARD OF EXCELLENCE IN TUBULAR WELDING ELECTRODES Fort Loramie, Ohio — Select-Arc, Inc. manufactures a complete line of premium quality flux-cored and metal-cored welding electrodes: carbon steel, low alloy, stainless steel, nickel alloy and hardsurfacing. The company backs its exceptional welding wire products with outstanding service and the best value-added in the industry. Select-Arc sets the standard of excellence in tubular welding electrodes.

SHERWOOD VALVE EXPANDS PRODUCT OFFERINGS

SHERWOOD VALVE

Washington, Pennsylvania — Sherwood continues new product development of valves for medical gases, calibration gases and specialty gas applications to be released in 2016. Stop by the Sherwood booth to learn more about our current products and find out about our custom design capabilities. Sherwood provides American-made products and service you can trust.

BOTH AVAILABLE DOT and ISO Cylinders Head Office: 6600 Sands Point Dr. #121 Houston, TX 77074 P: (713) 779-8882 F: (713) 774-1763

For cylinder services including painting, valve and neck ring installation and stamping contact our Service Center: 7171 Patterson Drive Garden Grove, CA 92841 P: (714) 893-4951 F: (714) 891-3403

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Spring 2016

EXHIBITORS GUIDE SUPERIOR PRODUCTS CELEBRATES 70 YEARS IN BUSINESS Cleveland, Ohio — Celebrating 70 years in business in 2016, Superior Products will showcase an expanded product offering of semi-automatic manifolds and manifold systems and new quick connects for welding equipment. Spend time with us to learn why more distributors are switching to the Superior Brand of products.

UNIWELD CELEBRATES HISTORY OF INNOVATION Fort Lauderdale, Florida — Uniweld Products is featuring the hottest products in their sales lineup. Stop by to see why their more than 65 years in business have successfully mirrored their growth.

SUPERIOR

VEITE INSTALLS FILL PLANTS

UNIWELD

North Ridgeville, Ohio — Veite Cryogenic Equipment and Service (VCE) designs, manufactures and installs custom cryogenic, high-pressure gas delivery systems and turnkey compressed gas distributor fill plants for industrial and medical gases. Available for same-day shipment. Veite offers a complete line of quality tested cryogenic hardware and equipment, including cryogenic transfer pumps.

Stop by the GAWDA booth to meet the consultants and tell us how to make your membership experience even better.

VEITE

TECHNOLOGY FOR THE WELDER’S WORLD.

Fumes suck...

The life out of you.

RAB Grip TA

Fume Extraction MIG

Threaded, Low-Profile Consumables

Puts the life back in you.

www. b i nz el - a b i c o r. com

Spring 2016

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EXHIBITORS GUIDE VOESTALPINE BÖHLER WELDING HAS COMPREHENSIVE GLOBAL PRESENCE

VOESTALPINE BÖHLER WELDING

Houston, Texas — Voestalpine Böhler Welding’s Böhler Welding, UTP / maintenance and Fontargen Brazing divisions provide a range of soldering and welding filler metals in joint welding, welding for repair and maintenance, and brazing and soldering. Expertise is provided to the oil and gas, pipeline, chemical, power generation, transportation and automotive industries, and more.

WDPG/THE HORTON GROUP PREMIER BUSINESS INSURANCE PROVIDER

WDPG

Nashville, Tennessee — The WDPG insurance program is the premier business insurance program to the welding and gas industry. The Horton Group is the leading single agency providing more business insurance to more welding supply distributors than any other independent agency.

Since 1987 the WDPG has delivered innovative business insurance and risk management solutions.

WEH TECHNOLOGIES OFFERS SOLUTIONS Katy, Texas — The original, previously private labeled WEH Quick connectors are German made, certified, well proven, highest quality tool, and now serviced in Texas. Improve safety, reliability and quality of your compressed gases filling plants with this long-lasting tool. A worldwide operating privately owned family company dedicated to eliminate all repetitive thread connections.

FIBA - A RecognIzed LeAdeR In

TechnoLogy, InnovATIon, expeRIence & cApABILITIes

FIBA Technologies, Inc. 1535 Grafton Road, Millbury, MA USA 01527 Phone: 508.887.7100 | Fax: 508.754.2254 | www.fibatech.com

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Spring 2016

EXHIBITORS GUIDE WELCOME TO WELDCOA 2016 Aurora, Illinois — Two years ago Weldcoa began a top-to-bottom overhaul of our entire manufacturing process, adding nearly $2,000,000 worth of automated manufacturing technology and equipment. Today, we are now an in-stock supplier, providing you with the highest quality products, when you need them, at the best possible price.

WELDCOA

WELDSHIP INTRODUCES NEW STORAGE SOLUTIONS Bethlehem, Pennsylvania — Weldship Corporation provides alternative solutions for compressed gas storage with new compact 12-foot ASME ground storage tube assemblies. Stackable tubes can range from a single tube up to as many as desired, while acting as an answer to on-site space limitations. Weldship provides more opportunities for storage within confined spaces.

WELDSHIP INDUSTRIES

WORTHINGTON INDUSTRIES LEADING WITH EXPERTISE Columbus, Ohio — Worthington Industries is the leading manufacturer of pressure cylinders and related products for industrial, alternative fuels, energy, and consumer products markets. Our steel and composite cylinders, cryogenic vessels, storage tanks and specialty components serve more than 4,000 customers in 70 countries, and are backed by market-leading technical, product and market expertise and unsurpassed customer service.

WORTHINGTON

On-Site Gas Blending with a wide range of flow rates for large manufacturing companies to small mom & pop shops!

Trumix® Gas Blenders Value to the entire gas management system.

Accurate Blend.

Automatic shut off.

No electricity, floor space or storage tanks.

Shielding Gas / Food Packaging / Beer Dispense Call for details!

www.McDantim.com • 888.735.5607 Spring 2016

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Sales and Marketing

Understanding Your Customers The More You Know the More Sales Grow by thomas decarlo, ph.d.

S Thomas DeCarlo, Ph.D., is the Ben S. Weil Endowed Chair of Industrial Distribution and Director of the Charles & Patsy Collat Industrial Distribution Program in the Collat School of Business at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. He’s a noted researcher, consultant, teacher and author of distribution management. He can be reached at: tdecarlo@ uab.edu and 205-934-8989.

SMC Presenter

uppose sales at your firm have been holding steady, or even slightly increasing. Though these are undeniably positive outcomes, would you be able to pinpoint the specific reasons why your customers are giving you repeat business? Would you know how many of these repeat customers are susceptible to leave to a competitor?

Alternatively, if sales have been decreasing of late, would your firm know why this is the case? Are you meeting customer expectations, but being outperformed by competitors who are “pulling” customers away? Perhaps you’re inadvertently “pushing” existing and potential customers elsewhere because specific aspects of your service offerings are falling short of expectations. More important is this question: Do you know if your customers are fulfilling the majority of their gas and welding product needs from your company?

Based on my research findings with industrial distributors, a customer’s share-of-wallet (i.e., the percentage of their total spend in a category) is critically important to financial performance.

Interestingly enough, it is not strongly related to customer satisfaction, however.

If traditional measures of customer satisfaction don’t predict share-of-wallet, what does?

I have found that, over years of conducting customer-based surveys for distributors selling commodity-type products, a consistent result has emerged. It’s this: If your customers are buying your company’s products and at least one other competitor’s for a given product category, a significant amount of your company’s share-ofwallet can be explained by a few key factors.

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These factors include: • Salesperson performance • On-time delivery • Product quality • Customer support For example, a reoccurring finding in my research is that while customers will rate salesperson likeability very high (ranging between 6.00 – 6.50 on a 7.00-point scale), total share-of-wallet for the company’s total spend in the category would often be less than 30 percent. This low share can often be explained by customer perceptions of organizational weaknesses involving delivery, product quality, or customer service issues.

ONLY A GUESS?

Interestingly, when I survey industrial distribution salespeople about their activities and customer perceptions, they tend to overestimate not only the impact of their partnering activities but, more important, the customer’s share-ofwallet for the company’s products.

What this suggests is that without a comprehensive understanding of your customers, many companies may only be able to guess at why sales at their firm are increasing or decreasing, why customers are leaving, or how vulnerable current customers are to competitor offerings.

In answering questions like these, it is critically important to obtain specific insight into: • How customers perceive your firm’s performance on important service dimensions • The performance levels that customers expect from you • How those perceptions differ from those associated with the competition.

Spring 2016

Sales and Marketing Such information is also important for developing future strategic initiatives designed to continue an uptick or to reverse a downturn in sales.

For the benefit of the GAWDA members, I have developed a web-based customer-survey template designed to provide insights into these issues. (I will be making a more detailed presentation about this survey and what the data you collect through your own survey can illustrate in terms of strategic business decision-making, during my talk at the GAWDA Spring Management Conference.)

Specifically, this free online survey can help members understand: • How customers perceive supplier performance on a number of important service and product dimensions (e.g., product quality, delivery, salesperson, etc.)

• How this performance compares to the performance expected by gas and welder suppliers • What performance levels they associate with the competition • The perceived importance of the different service dimensions to their business.

Spring 2016

DOWNLOADABLE SURVEY

GAWDA Members can access more information about the survey, and a link to it here: www.gawda.org/resources/2016-css-template/.

Once the survey is downloaded, GAWDA members then own it. They can modify the survey to fit their company’s specific needs. In addition, anyone in their company is free to use it as often as needed. This is a new resource GAWDA has provided, and it’s a valuable business benefit to members.

I recently tested the survey with the customers of a GAWDAmember firm. While I cannot disclose the firm’s name or the results in their entirety for confidentiality reasons, the study showed that the firm’s customers rated its salespeople and services as significantly better than the competition. (Hopefully, your firm was not one of those rated in the competitive analysis, as the averages were significantly lower than the focal firm.)

While this was good news to the studied company’s management team, the results also suggested some areas for improvement.

For instance, the study showed that, in several of the sales and service dimensions customers perceived as important, the firm was either barely meeting or slightly

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Sales and Marketing below customer expectations. Armed with this information, management now can craft specific service strategies and activities designed to improve performance on those dimensions. Without this information, it could likely be business as usual, potentially increasing the chance of a competitor taking away market share.

THREE KEY DIMENSIONS

The survey also assessed the importance of each service dimension to the customer’s business. While your customers may have their own unique set of important service dimensions, this survey identified three key service dimensions.

Interestingly, some of the most important service dimensions were different from the suppliers’ expectations. Information such as this would be critically important in managing future customer purchase intentions. Here again, suppliers should be aware of what is most important to their customers; particularly when one of the most important service dimensions was rated below customer expectations in terms of performance.

Finally, from this survey data, we are able to provide a gap analysis between expectations and actual performance,

which highlights specific areas for improvement. One benefit in conducting a gap analysis is that it captures the range of service levels within which a company is meeting customer expectations. Another benefit of capturing this information is that it allows the member firm to benchmark these results with future studies to determine the long-term effectiveness of its training and/or customer retention programs. Tracking how customer perceptions change over time is critical to sustaining a long-term competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Would you know which service dimension is most important to your customers?

FINDING TALENT

In closing, because I teach students in the field of industrial distribution, I would like to highlight the aspiring professionals from my program. I can attest that these graduates are highly motivated, moveable and fully prepared for positions such as technical sales, operations, social media/marketing and logistics. As you consider your hiring needs, I recommend recruiting graduates from the Industrial Distribution Program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

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The Age of Disruption – A Call For Innovation Three truths to guide your leadership of change and innovation by dirk beveridge

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uring research for my book (INNOVATE! How Successful Distributors Lead Change In Disruptive Times), I uncovered the fact that 85 percent of the leaders in the distribution industry believe they need to reinvent their businesses before someone else does.

Let that soak in.

We live in disruptive times. We find ourselves leading our businesses at a time when change is happening at a faster rate than ever before. There are macro, global, foundational and systemic shifts taking place throughout the world that are affecting our businesses. While not meant to be an exhaustive list, many trends indicate that our world — and the managing of our businesses — are becoming more complex. (These are detailed in the sidebar story on page 87). Each of these trends has the potential to affect our business — and disrupt it in untold ways.

There is a significant need for change, and those of us in leadership positions in our businesses have been called to make that change happen. One more time: We’ve been called to lead change and to ensure the individuals on our teams innovate for the future.

addressed the changes — big and small — that needed to be made in the business.

As I walked the room, the vice president of operations looked at me with a sign of resignation as she said to me, “We’ve done this before.

Nothing changed last time and nothing will come of it this time, either.”

The status quo is your enemy and you’re being pulled toward it. Break free now!

The fact is that you are surrounded by people who will fight change every step of the way. But, and this is a (good) big but — you also have people who yearn for change. Find those within your organization who embrace, seek out and relish change. Remove the obstacles for them and set them free to obliterate “the way we’ve always done it.”

THREE TRUTHS

Find those within your organization who embrace, seek out and relish change.

Remove the obstacles for them and set them free to obliterate ‘the way we’ve always done it.’

1. The status quo is your enemy I once was monitoring a strategic planning session being led by a consultant for a midsized distributor. You should have seen the walls. They were filled with flip charts outlining ideas, strategies, tactics and plans for the coming year. They

2. Relevance: the new mandate If there is ever a reason to obliterate the status quo, this is it: More than ever, our relevancy is not guaranteed. The market doesn’t care how many years we’ve been in business, how many brick-and-mortar locations we have or how we saved that customer five years ago.

Here are three truths I offer to guide you as you lead this change and innovation.

Spring 2016

Dirk Beveridge is the industry authority on and is leading the movement of change, innovation, and transformation throughout the realm of distribution. He is founder of the UnleashWD Innovation Summit, the only innovation summit for distributors. He can be reached at www.dirkbeveridge.com.

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Best Practices The definition of adding value is rapidly morphing.

Yesterday we were relevant because of the relationships we had, the manufacturers we represented and the knowledge we possessed. Now, each of these components of business is rapidly being commoditized.

Relevancy today demands that we are closer than ever to the customer, identifying, more often than not, the unarticulated jobs they need done, the pains they need eliminated and the gains they seek.

Remaining relevant, then, requires us to build a business model that allows for the creating, delivering and capturing of this new value.

3. Comfort will disrupt us New models require looking at things in completely new ways and thinking differently. And it requires that we look at our business as if we have never seen it. That’s not easy to do. We built what we have. We’re proud of what we built, and this pride wants us to sustain the status quo (see above).

We do live in the age of disruption. There are fundamental shifts taking place — geo-politically, economically, demographically, technologically…we could go on. Each of these fundamental shifts will make us uncomfortable as we enter the unknown.

This unknown future is upon us, so let’s embrace it! Let’s lean forward knowing we do so with sweaty palms, vulnerability and with many questions.

With all this talk of disruption and disintermediation, the only thing that can disrupt us is our refusal to get uncomfortable. Get uncomfortable now!

WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW

Pull your team of change agents together and review the plans you outlined for 2016. Ask yourself these four questions: 1. Have we started with massive action or are we waiting for the stars to align?

2. Are our plans 100 percent focused on hitting numbers for 2016, or is there also a commitment and investment to the innovation, change and transformation that’s required for the future as well?

3. What specific plans do you have to get closer to your customers?

4. Are we demonstrating — through our actions and investment of scarce resources — that we are committed to becoming uncomfortable through experimentation and innovation?

Now is the time to evaluate these truths, because they will help you tip the future in your favor.

Here’s to your future!

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SYSTEMIC SHIFTS OF DISRUPTION These trends represent global conditions, geographic and demographic realities, and the effects that government activities and emerging technologies are having on business operations today.

Geo-political Issues • Political unrest • Realignment of economic activity from the West to the East • Globalization and global markets • Economic uncertainty Demographic Shifts Rise of Millennials (having five generations in the workforce) • Retiring Babyboomers • Urbanization • Health factors and aging • Highly skilled labor requirements • Changing “buyer’s journey” •

Government Influence Increasing regulations • Washington gridlock • Natural resource sustainability • Health care • Military cutbacks • Corporate governance •

Disruptive Technologies • Big data, Cloud • Mobile • Social Media • Internet of Things • 3D printing • App economy • Knowledge economy • Zero-friction information sharing Competitive Environment New and non-traditional competitors • Market consolidation • Commoditization • Attracting high-quality talent • Blending of industrial, financial, and creative economies • Changing business models •

– dirk beveridge Spring 2016

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The Superior Value of Experiential Training ‘Vivid’ Learning Pays Off in Retained Lessons and Retained Employees by steven wiley

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Steven B. Wiley, president of the Lincoln Leadership Institute at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania has negotiated multi-million-dollar funding agreements, founded two international franchise organizations and a chain of fleet management centers, and is a highly acclaimed speaker and performance coach. He can be reached at info@lincolnleadershipgroup. com or 717-338-9971.

xperiential education has been a part of American training and development since the 1610s. Fully three-quarters of the settlers who came to Virginia in the 17th century were indentured servants who had agreed to labor under a master craftsman for a few years in exchange for hands-on experience and training.

While this type of training was theoretically sound, the reality was a bit different. That’s because the master craftsmen could beat their indentured servants, and a full 75 percent of these apprentices would die within the first year of disease, not ever completing their full developmental program.

Thankfully, most training and development programs have improved over the past 400 years.

Today’s experiential education is a vast evolution from the indentured servitude/apprentice system of half a millennium ago, but is based on the same core concept: people learn best when all their senses and learning styles are engaged in an experience they will never forget. People learn best when they learn emotionally, and the way to learn emotionally is through a vivid, living, personal experience that will stay with the individual forever.

70-20-10 TRAINING

SMC Presenter

A new report from Bersin & Associates, a leading human resource research and advisory services firm, finds that the most sophisticated companies follow a 70-20-10 formula, whereby 70 percent of learning is experiential, 20 percent is through coaching, feedback, networking, and other similar activities. The remaining ten percent is through a more traditional classroom-type environment. The most effective experiential

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leadership development programs vary from the 1600s servitude and present-day “on the job training” in one important way—through the application of a concept social psychologists call parallel learning, or lateral thinking.

When people are offered opportunities to closely examine their individual leadership and organizational issues, oftentimes the resulting anxieties, insecurities and fear of “talking out of school” doom the training. By contrast, leadership programs that use metaphors are able to get participants thinking critically about leadership issues—create “ah ha” moments—and then encourage leaders to think about implications for their daily jobs.

THE GETTYSBURG EFFECT

Metaphors and experiential leadership programs work hand-in-hand at places like the Gettysburg Battlefield, where groups can discuss communications tools that might have allowed Confederate General James Longstreet to convince Robert E. Lee that sending 15,000 men across an open field (Pickett’s Charge) was not a great idea.

At Gettysburg, by walking the ground there, participants start to understand emotionally, and then intellectually, the importance of those communications tools—thereby internalizing them forever.

Studies tell us that by the time a person leaves a training, they have forgotten 50 percent of what they have heard and will forget another 25 percent before the next morning. A week later, they only remember a tenth of the concepts presented. But 10 years from now, people will remember the experience of walking Pickett’s Charge, and thus will remember the leadership lessons that brought them to the field that day.

Spring 2016

Best Practices We believe that the typical corporate or government leader will attend hundreds of trainings throughout their career, yet the ones they will never forget have an experiential component.

COGNITIVE DIFFERENCES

The psychology behind experiential leadership development programs dates back to the early 1980s and Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. Essentially, Gardner argued that people can have differing levels of ability in these cognitive areas: logical-mathematical, spatial, linguistic, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic and existential.

For a generation, colleges training America’s future teachers have emphasized the need for educators to develop lessons that reach students who may have real abilities in some areas and severe limitations in others. We probably all remember some poor teachers who taught only to one style (not ours), and thereby turned many students off forever to a particular subject. We probably also remember another teacher who used a tremendous variety of instruction methods and kept us engaged.

The traditional leadership development instruction methods mirror this first style of teacher, who did not recognize the different

learning styles present in individuals. But by combining classroom metaphors with experiential learning, today’s organizations can create leadership development opportunities to impact people who have diverse cognitive abilities and predilections.

VALUE WORTH THE COST

Experiential leadership development programs can be more expensive than traditional trainings, but the increased cost of experiential leadership development programs should turn customers on, not off.

In their survey of 400 of the nation’s best organizations, Bersin & Associates found that those who excel at leadership development spend 60 percent more per person, on average, than pedestrian companies—however, those investments are seven times more likely to deliver stronger business and talents results than their competitors. Furthermore, the survey showed, those companies have an employee retention rate that is 20 times higher! When we consider that the total cost of replacing an employee is approximately 150 percent of that person’s annual salary, this is quite a return on investment.

In today’s workforce, having a reputation as an organization

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Best Practices that provides exciting and transformational leadership experiences can be a major recruiting tool—and that’s particularly so for the newest generation in the workforce, which is more accustomed to this style of learning.

‘HIGH POTENTIAL’ WORKERS

The Bersin & Associates study also found that organizations are targeting “high potential” employees—and that companies also are investing much more heavily in this group than in any other employee segment. The study found that 19 percent of training dollars (or over $7,000 a person) is being spent on this “high potential” demographic—as compared to $6,000 on “senior leaders” and $2,700 on “mid-level leaders.”

This approach seems justified on the surface, but as Morgan McCall argued nearly 15 years ago (in High Flyers: Developing the Next Generation of Leaders), trying to predict, years in the future, which young employees have “potential” is just as likely to meet with success as the poker player who consistently bets against the house. Instead, we contend that it is the organizations that commit to leadership development for all their employees that consistently find the diamonds in the rough, rather than

those organizations that try to game the system.

In short, experiential education programs can create a vivid, living, personal experience that will stay with employees for their entire career and constantly remind them of key leadership lessons.

Whether that experience is walking the hallowed ground at Gettysburg, jumping in a race car to see what it feels like to trust a colleague with your life, or flying over the bay at Pearl Harbor, experiential leadership development programs are both more exciting and more effective than traditional classroom-based seminars.

We recommend that you consider offering these experiences to all your employees. The only thing better than profoundly impacting the senior leader—who will be with your organization for another ten years—is changing the life and leadership capabilities of a young, first-line supervisor who might be a part of your organization’s culture for three times that long.

If the cost of intensive experiential leadership development programs seems daunting, know that for a 60 percent increase in investment, your return is up to seven times higher, and retention up to 20 times higher.

Experiential education is now, and it is the future.

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Looking Though the Plate Glass Window A Glimpse Into Corporate Reputation Management Strategies by marjorie young

T

ake a moment to think back to some of your favorite childhood memories. Do you remember the aroma of your mother’s home-baked cookies, or the smell of your father’s aftershave? What I recall are the smells of printing press cleaning chemicals and ink from my parents’ publishing business in the Washington, D.C. area. My childhood recollections are filled with the sights and sounds of running presses, stacks of paper and my parents working late into the night to meet deadlines.

I graduated from the University of Maryland in 1983 and was married to an Army doctor. We got transferred to Italy then to Germany. Then in 1986, my mother died suddenly, and my father struggled to keep the business going. In 1989, when my husband was deployed during the first Gulf War, I returned to the States with my twoyear-old daughter to help with the business. What I learned was that the business was on the verge of bankruptcy.

One night I asked my dad to babysit Carol while I went to his shop. There, I sat on the floor looking at piles of unpaid bills and started to cry. I didn’t know what to do, so asked God for help, and as I did, I looked up at the large plate glass window next to the front door and realized that there was no sign showing the name of the company.

Instead of being even more despondent, I got up, went to the desk, turned on the computer, opened a design program and placed one letter on the page: C. It printed out, and then I went to the back to find a pair of scissors in the prepress areas. I carefully cut the letter C out of the crisp white paper. Two hours later I had printed and cut out all the letters that spelled the name

of the company. I found some clear masking tape and eyeballed each letter along the top of the huge window.

It was 1:30 a.m. when I got in the car. I smiled at the new sign, CARRIAGE TRADE PRINTING. It fit perfectly across the entire window. As I left the parking lot, I looked at the sign in the rear-view mirror and felt a glimmer of hope. We might have a chance of survival if we did some marketing.

THE FOUNDATION

As I drove away, I did not know that my journey to salvage my family’s business would be the foundation of a successful business and marketing model. When I printed those letters for the plate glass window, I was actually taking the initial steps to develop a marketing methodology I’d eventually trademark as the REPUTATION MATRIX METHOD that would bring credibility and visibility to many other businesses, including my own.

No matter the nature of the business, its clientele or end product, the power of building a positive reputation is as imperative today as it was a hundred years ago. People still rely on word-of-mouth (even virtually through Google searches and social media) to make decisions on whether to buy from a company.

Using a marketing plan, such as the REPUTATION MATRIX METHOD, helps companies tap into the power of: • The Repeatable Tag Line — If a business owner can’t say, in less than 10 words, what the company does, how on earth can they expect others to be able to talk about it?

Spring 2016

Marjorie Young, CEO and president of Carriage Trade PR, can be reached at: “Marjorie Young” on Facebook; “MYSAVANNAH” on Twitter, and at marjorie@carriagetradepr.com

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•

Advertising Versus Public Relations — When a business purchases an ad, it is a great way to let the public know about an event or a special promotion, but it isn’t the best way to highlight the firm’s reputation. That comes with a slow build, over time, consistently demonstrating the company is a reliable organization.

SALES PICK-UP

•

Credibility Markers — When potential clients read about a company’s good news — new hires, winning awards, giving speeches, community leadership positions and charitable acts — these are credibility markers that help potential clients make decisions about doing business with them. When combined with researched keywords and strategic distribution, a company’s visibility and credibility get a huge boost online and in the community.

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After that night in the print shop, we slowly started to increase sales. I had learned about the power of the press release while pursuing a degree in journalism at the University of Maryland. One of the first things I did was to write a press release announcing that our family business was about to celebrate 30 years of business. A reporter from the Washington Times came out and interviewed us, took pictures and talked to our few clients.

We were fortunate to get a beautiful article on the front page of the business section, with a big picture of my brother, father and me working in the shop. We mailed the article to potential new clients and then began an all-out marketing campaign. We still had a long climb out of huge debt, but

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Spring 2016

Best Practices five years later, we finally made the last back-payroll penalty payment to the IRS. That was also the year I moved to Savannah, Georgia.

I will be forever grateful for the business lessons I learned during those first five years, because it gave me the confidence to start my own company in 1995. I decided to open a public relations firm, which I named “Carriage Trade PR” in honor of my family’s publishing business.

In 2006, I was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by the Savannah Area Chamber of Commerce. My father was in the audience as I took the podium and thanked him for instilling the importance of owning my own business and fighting for my own financial freedom. I dedicated the award to him. Three weeks later, he died in my arms of stage-four lung cancer.

Tough times will change your life forever. I always say you should thank those times of testing, because they are teaching you something you need to know. If you don’t learn lessons from the adversity, you will be tested again and again.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned that night back in my parents’ print shop is that the success of any business depends on much more than having the know-how or the right tools to produce a commodity. It’s just as much about 23-5578_1/4 page b/w ad establishing and maintaining a good reputation that extends from the industry the company represents, to the clients and stockholders it serves and the community where it is located. No matter what the business manufactures, its real product is integrity.

The success of any business depends on much more than having the know-how or the right tools to produce a commodity. No matter what the business manufactures, its real product is integrity.

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On the Edge

Dealing With Disruption: We’ve Been There Before Disruptive forces have been part of our industry for many years by ken thompson

Ken Thompson, an Association member since 1960, started with the Distributor Products Department of Union Carbide Corporation’s Linde Division and has served in executive and principal ownership positions in gases manufacturing, wholesale and retail distribution. He has represented the Buying and Information Group as their facilitator for the past 20 years and has served on many industry boards. Connect with him at: tomgroup@mindspring.com.

SMC Presenter

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AWDA President Bill Visintainer spoke of Industry Disruption in his inaugural address and it has become the theme for his year as our president.

While it would be preferable to plan positive disruptive activities within one’s organization as part of continuing improvement, we often find ourselves reacting to disruptive forces over which we have little control. It may be helpful to recall suggestions from the Serenity Prayer, which suggests that we change those things over which we have influence, recognize forces over which we have no control and have the wisdom to define the difference.

Disruptive forces have been present in our Industry Space for many years.

An easy example would be to look back to Peter McCausland’s initial acquisition of Connecticut Oxygen Company more than 30 years ago. The formation of Airgas has been responsible for a catalog of positive disruptive forces impacting the industry for many years.

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BUILDING FROM ACQUISITIONS

The acquisition of so many small independent distributorships has been a vehicle of beneficial gain for countless individuals. It served as a driving force for building for the expansion of industry buying groups — individual distributors consolidating purchase volumes to level the field as Airgas built an enormous footprint. National accounts strategies had to be developed. Airgas embraced internal continuous improvement and lean programs, encouraging their suppliers, as well as independent distributors, to find inefficiencies within their respective organizations and to improve all sorts of processes. Collectively, these efforts have made us much better partners with our end users and suppliers.

With the closing of the Air Liquide acquisition, many dedicated Airgas managers will be justly rewarded and we may see a whole new series of evolutions that will challenge an industry to manage change again.

Merger and acquisition activities over the Spring 2016

1920

On the Edge 1915

years have not been limited to Airgas. Nearly all of the major gas producing companies have engaged in moving in and out of the packaged gases business over the past 30 years. The total census of privately owned distributorships has fallen dramatically, but that change has been matched by the growth of large regional companies with skill sets and capabilities far exceeding those of the early stage ‘Norm Distributor.’

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has a method for quality.

• Stainless steel flux-cored wire • Mild steel flux-cored wire • Mild steel solid wire

CHANGE VIA TECHNOLOGY

The world of e-business is placing disruptive challenges on all segments of our business. In addition to new entrants bringing alternate sources to our traditional client bases, industry manufacturers are seeing their long-standing supply chain channels blurred by that development.

In addition, between the Millennial culture and rapidly developing technology, our traditional models of catalogand doughnut-carrying salespeople making smokestack calls no longer works.

Product and process research, training, safe practice issues, documentation, inventory availability, and the whole set of transactional functions will be at everyone’s fingertips through technology. Suppliers, distributors, and technology platform providers are going to have to find new ways to meet the demands of rapidly changing end users.

K

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Kobelco is your right choice for long term success. We will continuously provide consistent, high quality products, spool after spool. Call us now for availability in your area.

“Our traditional model of catalogand doughnut-carrying salespeople making smokestack calls no longer works.”

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A CONTINUING CONVERSATION

Bill Visintainer has placed the subject of the recognition and mitigation of disruptive forces front and center for our Savannah Spring Management Conference program. As is the case with so many past challenging business evolutions, the talent resources residing in our industry, from both the supplier and distributor sectors, will rise to the task.

We should be able to carry these discussions forward through a year of Regional Meetings — all begging for meaningful content — and have confidence we will find some mutually satisfactory and profitable solutions by the time we visit Maui for GAWDA’s Annual Convention.

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On the Edge

Why Are We Still Here?

Another Look at an Essential Question and a Great Industry Conversation by jim earlbeck

Y Jim Earlbeck is president of Earlbeck Gases & Technologies with locations in Baltimore and Beltsville, Maryland and in York, Pennsylvania. A past vice president on GAWDA’s Board of Directors, he can be reached at www. earlbeck.com; jearlbeck@ earlbeck.com; and by phone at 410-687-8400.

SMC Presenter

ou may not be aware of this, but your business, regardless of whether you are a distributor or an American manufacturer, is at risk. To borrow military terms, I would say we are at “DEFCON 2,” which means that the next step (DEFCON 1) is nuclear war.

Maybe I am just paranoid, but I believe that some paranoia is a good thing for a business person.

It motivates us to stay ahead of the innovation curve and allows us to survive. We have to keep asking ourselves “Why are we still here”?

If you aren’t a little paranoid about your business operations, you might just end up like Kodak. At one time, that company was making money at every step of the photographic process.

You used a Kodak camera that employed Kodak flash cubes and Kodak film. Then you had those pictures developed on Kodak paper using Kodak chemicals. It was an incredible business model— for some time.

Then a disruptor came into the picture.

Ironically, this disruptor was a Kodak employee.

Steven Sasson was a 23-year-old Kodak engineer who invented the digital camera. When he pitched his new invention to the firm’s upper management in 1975, their response was less than welcoming.

The Kodak brass were convinced that no one would want to see pictures on a television set.

They reminded themselves that print had been around for the past 100 years and that no one was complaining. So they sold off the camera’s patent rights. Kodak went bankrupt in 2012 — in part because the company failed to ask: “Why are we still here?”

We may not have a Steven Sasson in our midst in this industry, but we are at risk due to what some

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are calling the third industrial revolution — the digitization of manufacturing and distribution and the emergence of intermodal transportation.

VIEWING THE RISK FOUNDATION

I examined the foundation of that risk a couple years ago, in an article published in this magazine. (If you are a Babyboomer, you can find that article in the stack of magazines that you’ve got randomly piled up in your office.

Titled, “Rethinking The Relationship,” it is on page 40 of the Fourth Quarter 2014 edition. If you are of a more contemporary nature, you can find it online at: www.weldingandgasestoday.org/ index.php/2014/09/rethinking-the-relationship/ .)

If you don’t have time for a full read of that article, I’ll revisit its key points here by providing this executive summary. I contended then that: • Brick and mortar distributors once clearly represented the lowest cost logistical path for a manufacturer’s products to reach the end user. Our trucks represented an almost exclusive means to deliver small quantities of products at a low cost.

Now, we are using UPS, USPS and FedEx to drop-ship everything that we can in order to minimize our transactional costs. Those same methods are available to our manufacturers to move products directly from their web-based stores to our customers.

• Distributors no longer have exclusive product offerings. We are no longer compelled to learn a single product line inside and out, knowing that if you did not educate the customer that your product was the best Spring 2016

On the Edge choice, the customer purchased a different brand from a competitor who was able to convincingly present their case.

You knew that you did not get a second chance to offer another brand, or perhaps a lower price, if your customer rejected your first offering.

• Distributors are no longer seen as the fountainhead of product knowledge today. Too often, distributors are allowing the exit of their technical staff, only to replace them with web-based stores that merely move products.

• What is the value of a distributor to a manufacturer if the distributor requires the manufacturer to set up the equipment and educate the end user?

• Distributors no longer have exclusive knowledge of who are and where are the end users. Armed with the proper NAICS code, any kid with a computer can quickly identify potential end users, their number of employees, their revenue stream and their primary points of contact.

• Manufacturers are no longer exclusively using traditional brick-and-mortar distributors. Manufacturers have set up alternate channels with Lowes, Home Depot and Tractor Supply, just to name a few other non-distributor outlets.

Spring 2016

Manufacturers are opening up their own online stores that compete directly with distributors.

• Manufacturers are worried that they are losing touch with the end users as distributors are not effectively delivering the manufacturer’s message.

• Manufacturers are worried about the ease with which foreign-made product flows to the distributor and end user.

• There is little to no conversation between the distributor and manufacturer on the options to resolve the issues mentioned above.

Since I made my GAWDA regional presentation in 2014, none of these situations has changed — which has allowed everything to change.

Unfortunately, no meaningful conversations have emerged or been arranged between distributors and manufacturers.

Distributor Advisor Council (DAC) meetings continue to be devoid of true opportunities as forums for understanding and the exploration of future possibilities. Distributors and manufacturers each seem to be determined to go their own way; perhaps that’s due to the lack of conversation.

The trouble is, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.

•

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On the Edge

A TOUGH DOWNWARD SPIRAL

Meanwhile, distributors continue to face tough marketplace conditions. Distributors’ margins on hard goods, particularly machines, have continued to deteriorate. (Some of the downward spiral of margins is due to the increased pressure from the distributors’ online stores.)

More concerning is the pressure from manufacturer’s online stores. Their investments in their stores are increasing and they are pushing for a return on those investments. As examples: • Recently, one manufacturer began offering free ancillary items, such as filler metals or circle cutting kits, with the purchase of machines, on which they had established Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP).

• Another manufacturer released a reduced-price promotion to their biggest online distributors—putting it out on the Internet more than two weeks before the manufacturer released the same promotional discount to their brickand-mortar distributors.

• Some distributors are now asking themselves why they are being pushed by manufacturers to provide information about the end user when a machine is sold. Is it to help the distributor make more sales to the end user, or

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to load the manufacturer’s data base so that they can directly pursue sales with the end user?

These kinds of situations only serve to degrade the trust between the manufacturer and the distributor.

A CALL FOR CONVERSATION

Perhaps if there is more conversation between the distributor and the end user, we could back down our feelings of paranoia and keep the industry risk warning to a DEFCON 4 level — in order for us to figure out how to best serve the end user. Both manufacturers and distributors in our industry still need to have a clear vision of “Why we are still here” in order to remain sustainable. Or maybe I am just paranoid.

As you may know, I’m fully vested in this topic of manufacturers and distributors working together, and I’ve been working to be a catalyst to lead this discussion. I welcome any comments or suggestions on how the distributors and manufacturers could work together to formulate a high-value proposition that the end user cannot refuse.

Perhaps if we work together, we can avoid becoming the next Kodak.

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Spring 2016

Human Resources

Learning With Generation Next How Work-Style Conflicts Offer Positive Opportunities by george ratermann

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ne of the ongoing conversations in the welding and gases distribution industry is about where we will find the next generation of industry workers, managers and leaders. Many of us now in this workforce are looking at our future years and our potential retirements. Already, there is a shortage of workers skilled and qualified in our field, and this will only increase over the next 10 to 15 years. Our replacements are going to have to come from somewhere. In line for those jobs are the youngest members of today’s workforce, “Generation Next.”

Generation Next is the current group of 18-to-25 year olds, “the cohort of young adults who have grown up with personal computers, cell phones and the Internet,” and “who came of age in the shadow of 9/11,” according to the Pew Research Center (http://www.people-press. org/2007/01/09/a-portrait-of-generation-next/).

I hope to demystify some common beliefs (and perhaps misperceptions) about this age group and focus on the benefits of working with them.

I have found it’s well worth working through on-the-job style differences, understanding their “cause”-related work motivation, and investing some faith in their abilities—even if some workplace situations require adjustments to typical operating guidelines. Here are examples from my own experiences.

LAPTOP TYPING

Frequently, it seems, the issues that give rise to potential conflict seem to revolve around communication techniques.

One day, several of us were in a sit-down

"About the time I was going to ask him to pay attention, he surprised me. In that time he had found a solution to the issue at hand." planning session and discussion about a new product. One of our young employees began to type, and it made many of us wonder if he was even listening to the discussion.

About the time I was going to ask him to pay attention, he surprised me. It turned out that in typing, he was doing research, and in that time had found a solution to the issue at hand. The meeting quickly went from talking about a problem to finalizing the prototype the company needed to solve the problem.

The lesson to me? One of the strengths of Generation Next employees is that they live and breathe in the moment. Due to their speed of typing, and agility and knowledge of different apps and search abilities, they contribute to an efficient, fast research process. It’s a great benefit, when harnessed correctly, to have a fast, nimble organization.

Here’s another example of why it’s important not to jump to conclusions if one of your younger workers is on the phone or laptop when you think they should be giving you their undivided attention.

During a one-on-one meeting with a very bright young person from our company’s product-development team, I found it difficult to concentrate and communicate because I could hear the person clicking away on his laptop. Was

Spring 2016

George Ratermann is president of Ratermann Manufacturing, Inc. of Livermore, California. He’s worked in the gases and welding industry since 1977. He can be reached at 800-264-7793 and at george@rmimfg.com.

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he hearing me, I wondered? He offered no visual contact and I wasn’t able to decipher his expressions and thoughts. It felt like I was in a foreign country and didn’t speak the language.

•

DEVELOP COMPROMISE

Together, that employee and I made a compromise. We decided to discuss a topic first, with the employee making key notes on a pad of paper. He would offer me some type of feedback or acknowledgement of our conversation. Then, I’d be OK with him typing on his laptop while I waited for the next point. Over time, that communication gap shrunk. I now can handle more of his typing while we talk, and he expresses more feedback.

COMMUNICATION BASICS

Communication structure and expectations are very different between the generations. What someone like me, as a Babyboomer, thinks should be natural isn’t that clear to a Generation Next young adult.

I’ve found that Generation Next people assume that they will simply follow through when they receive your text or email. However, those of my generation want confirmation.

We have to know our message has been received.

Another thing: most members of this age group don’t necessarily like voicemail and usually don’t check to see if they have any. We remind them that many of our customers do like voicemail, so we need them to check the phones and if voicemails are there, to return those calls. As a solution, we added WAV files to be sent for voicemails, so our Gen Next workers could listen to them via a cell phone or iPad. We also added voicemail converted to text so it is received as email.

As company practice, we’ve covered other communication and customer service basics to establish performance expectations. For instance: • Determining when a meeting needs to be a “no phone” type—requiring turning off phones and checking them at later times.

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The idea that customers may perceive someone isn’t paying attention to them if the staff member pulls out a phone and performs functions on it while you’re waiting on that customer. (It may be necessary to let the customer know that you’re checking a calendar or making a note of information.)

Showroom courtesy — so that when someone of the Babyboomer group is in the store, recognizing that person and validating them (as simple as saying, “I’ll be with you in just a moment.”)

Social Media protocols, including the type of company communication that should — or should not — be said or done via Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and others.

"Find the balance of compromise and work toward each other's styles. If you take the time to work with Generation Next people, you'll find them to be efficient, fast and quality workers."

CONCLUSION

It’s worth it to find the balance of compromise and to work toward each other’s styles, comforts and strengths.

If you take the time to work with Generation Next people, you’ll find them to be efficient, fast, and quality workers.

There’s a lot to be learned from them. They are different in their work approaches and that may require flexibility from their workplace and themselves. Issues that present initial conflict are great opportunities to understand them and adjust our companies to their strengths, in order to be an attractive employer and vendor in the years to come.

After all, these 18-25 year-old Generation Next-ers will, in time, become our next generation of customers, shop managers, purchasers, operations people and buying-decision makers.

Spring 2016

Human Resources

Looking For a New Crop of Employees?

Why You May Have to Grow Your Own by dr. norm clark

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istributors and manufacturers representing most industrial vertical marketing channels are facing a common challenge today. Their workforce is aging, and there is a shortage of qualified candidates to replace these highly-skilled employees when they leave. Yet here’s a pertinent question: Why aren’t more people — especially the workers available in the younger generations — attracted to careers in industrial distribution and manufacturing?

From my viewpoint as a professor in the Industrial Distribution program at Texas A & M University, and as someone who works to build industry-academic alliances, there appear to be three major reasons why that’s the case.

REASONS FOR THE CHALLENGE

At Texas A&M, we’ve discovered these reasons why hiring into the industry seems to be such a challenge: • There is a lack of awareness about career opportunities (particularly in distribution).

• The industry’s jobs are perceived as being ‘not as desirable’ as many other career routes.

• Education and training paths are not readily available or well publicized.

On the flip side of that equation is the stunning realization that wholesale distribution in the U S. is a $7 trillion-dollar industry (2015-2016 U. S. Census Facts). Still, many people don’t understand what distribution is as an industry, or how it works. Though they drive by warehouses every day, people seem to scarcely notice them. Most people perceive jobs in the industrial distribution and manufacturing sectors to be hard work, and to consist of jobs that typically are “dirty” and

sometimes hazardous. As I’ve found, there tends to be a belief that these are certainly not the types of professions people would choose if they had other choices. Finally, there are not a lot of high schools, vocational schools or colleges and universities that are training people for specific industrial jobs, particularly the kinds of work that is found in distribution.

A COMPLICATING FACTOR

While there is a clear misperception about the realities of the distribution industry and the kinds of jobs it offers, there’s a similar apprehension among employers about the kinds of workers who might nowadays be available to fill those jobs.

The facts are that a ready source of new workers — those “Millennials” (people born between 1980 and 2000) have already surpassed Generation-Xer’s as the largest generation in the U.S. labor force (http://www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2015/05/11/millennials-surpassgen-xers-as-the-largest-generation-in-u-s-labor-force/). Nevertheless, many employers in industry report having had bad experiences with employees from the millennial generation, and they report these common perceptions (maybe misperceptions) about the workforce demographic that tend to have negative impacts. They say millennial workers: • Are lazy • Are job-hoppers • Spend too much time on their smartphones • Have a sense of entitlement (that extends to the workplace) • Are impatient, and not willing to “pay their dues” to advance in an organization.

Spring 2016

Norm Clark, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer and associate director of the Thomas and Joan Read Center for Distribution Research and Education in the Dwight Look College of Engineering Technology and the Industrial Distribution Department at Texas A & M University, College Station, Texas. He now develops, markets, and delivers professional development programs to distributors and manufacturers globally.

He’s at: nclark@tamu. edu and 979-847-9076.

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Human Resources These comments are based on responses from participants in the workshops that I have conducted with groups of industry personnel representing a cross section of vertical marketing channels.

PERCEPTIONS AND REALITIES

Millennials are not good or bad, but they do exhibit different standards and habits from other generations of workers.

Employers who make the effort to understand these differences and to communicate them throughout their organizations generally have good success attracting, developing and retaining millennial-generation workers.

We’ve found that these are some of the things employers should understand about millennial-generation employees: • They grew up in a world of advanced technology; they use it every day and are not intimidated by it.

• They understand social media as a communication tool.

• Most want to be challenged in their work and to feel that they are making a contribution.

• They want to know that the job that they are doing is meaningful.

They want to understand how their work contributes to the success of the organization.

• They want to see a clear career path.

• They want open communication with their supervisors.

• They like to be part of a team and, oftentimes, don’t care who gets the credit for an idea or accomplishment.

Given that understanding, it’s easy to see how, when you take millennials and stick them in a warehouse with little or no direction or communication, they are apt to quit the job early. This generation of workers is not averse to the idea of going home and living with mom and dad while they look for another job. (That’s a luxury that most of us Babyboomers and Generation-Xer’s didn’t have, by the way).

•

PROMOTING YOUR INDUSTRY

The question that needs addressing in the center of this dichotomy is this: “Why can the welding and gases industry be a good fit for millennials, and how can we make it attractive to them?”

Here are some suggestions to consider that may help distributors attract young workers to the many jobs you already have, or soon will have, in your organizations.

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Human Resources The industry has a diverse client base which provides some economic stability and works to prevent pronounced highs and lows in demand.

• Although the industry is mature, advances in technology within its customer base continue to offer opportunities for new product applications and services.

• There is generally high visibility throughout organizations in this industry. Individuals have an opportunity to interact with other functions within an organization. (This is an element that enhances the feeling of being part of a team and making worthy contributions.)

Because the industrial distribution workforce is aging, the need for “new blood” is pressing. Now is an ideal time to create an atmosphere that welcomes new employees and provides them with challenges and opportunities early in their careers.

In addition, this is an industry where many attractive career paths and diverse organizational roles can be easily identified.

When a more-focused approach is taken to assessing the situation, these considerations seem to align well with what is important to millennials.

Here’s where my standing as part of the academic community that regularly deals with both industry professionals and the millennial worker generation can offer insights and recommendations.

•

FORMING ALLIANCES WITH ACADEMIA

This might be an opportune time for forging new alliances that can provide value to both the industry and its new potential workers.

Not a lot of qualified programs currently exist regarding education and training programs designed specifically to

develop a pool of qualified candidates for specific jobs in industrial distribution. However, this is important to note: The programs that do exist seem to have two positive elements in common. They have someone from industry (or a group of individuals) who is committed to championing the cause and they have someone from the academic institution (or a group of individuals) similarly committed to championing the cause.

This creates an alliance where both parties benefit.

Industry supports academia by providing: • Financial support for scholarships and funding to develop opportunities for experiential learning opportunities; labs, internship and co-op learning/working positions.

• Assistance with curriculum development, providing class projects, guest speakers and co-instruction in classrooms and labs.

• Jobs for the graduates of these programs.

The academic institutions likewise benefit, by: • Offering their students programs that prepare them for the workplace after graduation.

• Securing sources for the placement of their graduates.

• Creating alliances that provide funding and support in preparing their students for the workforce.

Some of these alliances exist, but not nearly enough do.

Many of these efforts have failed due to the lack of commitment or follow-through by one party or the other. It’s recognized that there is a lot of planning, hard work, and sustained energy and interest that goes into developing and sustaining these academic-workforce alliances. Still, considering that human capital is your most valuable asset, the future of your industry may depend on the right individuals from industry and academia stepping up to make these alliances happen.

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Spring 2016

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Money Matters

Market Innovations Are Today’s Competitive Advantages If Traditional Drivers No Longer Boost Business, Innovative Ideas Must by wayne twardokus

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Wayne Twardokus is a director at League Park Advisors of Cleveland, Ohio, a boutique investment bank. He has directed more than 54 merger/ acquisition transactions. He has authored various industry research reports specializing in the specialty distribution and industrial manufacturing industries. He’s at: wtwardokus@leaguepark. com and 216-455-9985.

istorically, gases and welding distributors were able to experience business growth from the underlying expansion of key end-markets, inflation and market share gains.

(You might say those were the “good old days” in terms of economic stability.) Going forward, though, these market elements no longer will be the primary drivers of increased business. In fact, 2016 will bring new and different challenges. The industry is poised for disruptive change, and the times will require distributors to seek new and innovative means to maintain their competitive market advantages.

CHALLENGES TO TRADITIONAL DRIVERS

Gases and welding distributors have long been the beneficiaries of business growth resulting from healthy market growth rates in the industrial, energy, metals, construction, medical, consumer, and electronics sectors.

In today’s murky economy however, the growth rates in the industrial, energy, and metals markets appear to be seriously challenged. In addition, the inflation rate is projected to remain low for an extended period of time and market share growth will likely be impeded by the increasing scale and competence of competitors. Meanwhile, the tactic of achieving business growth by expanding product offerings or served geographies, while

successful at times, has resulted in increased margin pressures.

The result is that gases and welding distributors in both the public and private sectors now need to find new ways to grow. That is an imperative to satisfying equity analysts, shareholders, and maintaining key supplier relationships as they all look to support growing companies.

NEW OBSTACLES AND OPPORTUNITIES

From a historical perspective, growth has been hampered by the inability to effectively replicate gases and welding distributors’ local service capabilities. However, in the Age of Disruption (which calls to question many traditional rules for growth in today’s global economy), it is fair to predict that change will be forced by players outside of traditional industry participants. Consequently, companies in the gas and welding distribution market will be forced to focus on innovation to overcome a new wave of changes.

This certainly isn’t news to those distributors who’ve been “in the trenches” and experiencing the ramifications of the marketplace. They’re already living this reality.

The current consumer-driven economy presents a number of obstacles and opportunities for growth for gas and welding distributors, nonetheless. A sample of these include: generational changes,

The current consumer-driven economy presents obstacles and opportunities for growth....generational changes, disruptive technology, new competition, and shifting business models.

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Money Matters disruptive technology, new competition and shifting business models. Here’s a further look at those issues: Generational Changes

Given that an increasing percentage of gases and welding distributor owners were born before 1964, that demographic factor will drive meaningful turnover in the executive ranks and ownership.

That said, 50 percent of customers, suppliers, and employees are now in the Millennial Generation. Consequently, distributors are struggling to identify the best employees in a shrinking talent pool that lacks technical training. In addition, Millennials interact in drastically different ways than the industry is accustomed to, which will force technological change and the adoption of technology into the operations of gases and welding distributors. Companies that embrace the Millennial Generation sooner, versus later, will be well-positioned to drive opportunities for growth.

With 50 percent of customers, suppliers, and employees now in the Millennial Generation, companies that embrace that market segment sooner, versus later, will be well-positioned to drive opportunities for growth.

Disruptive Technology

The emergence of the Internet of Things, which enables interconnectivity amongst all devices across the supply chain and promotes the exchange of real-time data for improved processes has been embraced by many wholesale distribution markets.

To what degree gases and welding distributors embrace the Internet of Things remains to be seen. However, nine out of 10

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Money Matters corporate executives in an Accenture survey said that factor will have a “major impact on their industry.” (The survey is at: https://www.accenture.com/t20150708T025454__w__/ fr-fr/_acnmedia/Accenture/Conversion-Assets/DotCom/ Documents/Local/fr-fr/PDF_5/Accenture-CEO-Briefing2015-Productivity-Outcomes-Internet-Things.pdf) The challenge will be leveraging the data that is collected, and then meaningfully implementing it to promote business growth. While many independent gases and welding distributors still lack ERP and RFID capabilities for efficient routing and inventory management, it is likely that advanced competitors will be focused on continuing to distance themselves from competition through improved operational efficiency.

New Competition

Historically, most gases and welding distributors competed against a known and limited set of regional competitors. Today, however, the competitive landscape has changed and we are seeing an emergence of competitors, including Amazon and other Internet suppliers that were not

previously on the radar.

Online shopping, even online window shopping, can tell a business a lot about its customers and its potential customers.

For instance, these dimensions can be determined: • What items are most looked at?

• Where are the people who view items located?

• How much time do they spend on the items?

All of this information can be leveraged to identify products that distributors might not currently be carrying in certain branches. As an example, if many customers in the Cleveland, Ohio, area are viewing certain items on the website, the distributor may want to stock that hardgoods product so it is readily available in the local branch.

This type of information is available to retailers even if they have the limited technology of a searchable catalog without actual purchasing capability. Simple Google Analytics tracking can provide much of this insight.

To illustrate this dynamic, while it may be difficult for Amazon to supply gases, its business model is set up to address markets such as the $2 billion hardgoods sector — a marketplace reality that could materially impact gases and welding distributors’ sales.

Companies that have the right mindset and that plan for identifying and utilizing the relevant data have a unique opportunity to quickly garner incremental market share.

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Shifting Business Models

Technology has opened the door for integrated supply, manufacturers providing direct supply, or even brokerage models. For example, we are starting to see asset-light companies such as Zephyr Solutions emerge and act as a national broker by leveraging a network of regional gas and welding distributors. Through technology, the company is capable of servicing national customer accounts without owning or managing the physical assets these customers require, simultaneously strengthening the independent supply chain that the company utilizes to service national accounts at the local level. Gases and welding distributors that continue to embrace change and challenge traditional operational philosophies are well-positioned to impact the market.

SUCCESS IN TODAY’S ECONOMY

In an effort to position themselves for long-term growth, it seems plausible that gases and welding distributors may anticipate capitalizing on the high degree of industry fragmentation to address shifting end-market dynamics and changing competitive environments.

These market dynamics are likely to have a notable impact, and also will continue to drive the level of gases and welding distribution mergers and acquisitions activity.

Independent distributor owners may be thinking that the large operations are the only available routes open to them when it’s time to merge or sell (especially given the purchase of Airgas and an elimination of another major). Still, it’s quite likely that we will see increased private equity activity in the market, a trend that’s already been occurring and proving to be a viable alternative in other wholesale distribution sectors now. The reason that is the case is twofold: private equity firms have more than a trillion dollars of purchasing power and they are seeking new opportunities for investment. In my experience, besides being an alternative to the majors, private equity firms offer those looking to restructure a great deal of flexibility in formulating a transaction. Because private equity firms are looking to make an investment in a company and grow it over time, they can work with selling shareholders in ways that structure a transaction that more particularly suits their unique needs.

While the gases and welding distribution market is at a unique inflection point with many new obstacles and opportunities, companies that embrace innovation will be well-positioned to grow, regardless of the economic environment.

Spring 2016

Money Matters

Global Overcapacity and Marketplace Impact A View of 4Q 2015 Trends and a Cautious Look-Ahead by david manthey

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s 2016 gets its start, industrial gas distributors are seeing many of the same trends as distributors of other commercial/industrial products. An overhang of global industrial capacity, the strong U.S. Dollar, falling commodities prices and slowing emerging market demand are at the root of current disruptive trends.

Together, these elements are resulting in lackluster demand and weak pricing for most distributors that sell into U.S. industrial end markets.

While these trends are observable from our vantage point at Robert W. Baird & Co., they likely are of little surprise to the GAWDA distributor members who are seeing them firsthand. By the time I reach Savannah to attend the GAWDA Spring Conference, there will be more to say about first-quarter activity and how those trends played out. As a member of the panel on disruptions and opportunities there, I’ll share observations about the broader industrial distribution universe and offer a look-ahead for the rest of 2016, focusing specifically on Industrial Gas trends.

For reference, Baird has been providing research specifically on industrial distribution markets for decades. We follow many companies that distribute a wide variety of products, encompassing wide product breadth within industrial supply, industrial gases, building products and facilities maintenance, and electrical and data communications industries. Within the industrial gas industry, we actively cover the U.S. -listed companies: Airgas, Air Products and Praxair. We also publish a quarterly survey of U.S. industrial gas distributors in partnership with CryoGas International.

OVERCAPACITY, OVERHANG

Based on trends we have seen over recent quarters, we believe overcapacity in the global industrial complex relative to slowing growth in emerging markets represents an overhang that will lead to slow growth and deflationary pressures for some time. We summarize this view into a guiding principle, which is, “The world is awash in too much of nearly everything.”

Our cautious outlook is based on these observations: • Manufacturing, energy and other natural resource markets continue to wind down excesses.

• Despite severe downturns, we remain cautious on the outlook for the manufacturing, agriculture, mining and energy end-markets.

• We believe near-term trends have yet to find a bottom, and that the unwinding of overcapacity will take more than a few quarters to run its course.

• Conversely, distributors with U.S.-centric drivers (such as repair/maintenance and construction), should do relatively better, assuming for now that broader global stresses and weakness do not feed into the U.S. residential and non-residential construction markets.

David Manthey is a senior analyst covering Industrial Distribution and Services at Robert W. Baird & Co. He can be contacted at: DManthey@rwbaird.com and at 813-288-8503.

OVERALL 4Q15 TRENDS

Taking a look at overall trends, these are our observations from the fourth quarter of last year: • We view revenue growth (excluding acquisitions) in the fourth quarter 2015 as flat to down slightly year-over-year.

• The year-over-year pace of business decelerated from the third quarter, as the impact

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•

• •

• •

of commodity- and foreign exchange-related headwinds, has yet to find a bottom.

Consequently, weak industrial demand again more than offset relative strength in building products/construction – a consistent theme throughout 2015.

Areas of relative strength included: Facilities Maintenance and Lumber and Building Materials.

Sectors seeing relative weakness were: Mechanical/ Power Transmission and Industrial/Energy PVF (pipe, valves and fittings).

Overall pricing has been flattish for some time, and may turn slightly negative across the broader industrial landscape.

Overall pricing conditions remain challenging given the weak commodity backdrop, and especially in industrial markets where lower commodities are coupled with continued soft demand.

For 2016, we see little in the way of near-term relief, due to the situation of global overcapacity. However, our observations include: • The general tone of industrial distributors suggests that revenue growth will improve slightly into 2016, and perhaps accelerate slightly through the year.

• While we acknowledge that easing comparisons should help to boost optics as the year progresses, many appear to be “hoping” for growth in spite of the fact that current economic indicators remain negative.

• Given typical small average order size and many maintenance and repair items, distributors generally have relatively low visibility.

Overcapacity in the global industrial complex...relative to emerging markets…represents an overhang that will lead to slow growth and deflationary pressures for some time.” output:Layout 1

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INDUSTRIAL GAS TRENDS

For Industrial Gas distributors specifically, our observations of fourth-quarter 2015 trends indicate the following: • A ggregate growth decelerated slightly vs. last quarter, with hardgoods seemingly decelerating more than gas sales year over year. Excluding price, we believe underlying volumes were flat to up slightly.

• Gas pricing gains (while still positive) stepped down slightly as weak demand may be impairing incremental pricing power.

• Hardgoods are seemingly under more pricing pressure, as there are more points of competition vs. gas, which is clearly a local business.

• As related to gas supply chains, we currently see few disruptions that would point to shortage-driven price increases.

• More recently, conversations with gas distributors imply slow to moderate growth into 2016, essentially unchanged compared with recent periods and in line with trends within the overall industry.

I look forward to participating in GAWDA’s panel discussion and sharing results and analysis from the Baird/ CryoGas survey. I hope to see you there.

Spring 2016

In Memoriam

In Memoriam

HEIDI THOMETZ

Heidi Thometz, of Billings, Montana, regarded fondly as a fixture at Computers Unlimited, passed away on December 19, 2015.

Her career at the company spanned more than three decades. She is remembered as a great mentor and as being highly admired in the computer software profession, which was a new frontier when she began working in the field. Her coworkers said she will be remembered for her infectious laughter, fearless attitude and unfailing work ethic.

She joined Computers Unlimited in 1982, beginning her career in customer support and over the years became a systems sales consultant, director of sales and new business development, and eventually, director of sales and marketing for both the industrial and medical aspects of the company.

She retired in 2014 due to illness and spent the remainder of her time enjoying her family and friends.

DAVID PEARL

David Pearl was born to Jacob and Goldie Pearl on October 21, 1918, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He died unexpectedly on December 20, 2015, at Broward General Hospital bringing his full, beautiful, and still productive life of 97 years to a sudden end.

His first job was as a paperboy where he quickly rose to an area manager, employing his friends and even his sister. He recruited employees by offering them cookies at his mother’s house after they made their deliveries. He was commissioned into the Navy in 1944 as a commander, Port Everglades Air/ Sea Rescue. He married Marjorie Hahn from Pittsburgh in the same year.

Pearl was an industrial visionary and after his naval service he and Maggie decided to settle permanently in the Fort Spring 2016

Lauderdale area. In 1949, he founded Uniweld Products, Inc., a company that continues to manufacture quality welding and refrigeration equipment. In order to supply his growing demand for some of his component parts, he found it necessary to “make it himself.” He started Continental Precision Instruments and Unibox, Inc. to fill those requirements and expanded those companies to serve others as well.

He remained married to Maggie for 69 years until her death in 2013. Together they raised three sons, traveled extensively, and she rode the horses he lovingly cared for. They bred many dogs, including their prize-winning Rhodesian Ridgebacks.

Pearl’s sense of humor and generous spirit made lasting impressions on family, friends and his many beloved employees.

He was never without a sage piece of advice and his sense of enthusiasm at life’s possibilities. He believed hard work was the key to success and expected all those around him to share in his work ethic. At 97 he still went to his office at least two to three times per week.

He is preceded in death by his wife Maggie, and his beloved grandchild Eric. He is survived by his sister Miriam Fineberg, three sons, James, David II, and Douglas as well as seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

JOHN “JERRY” HILF

John “Jerry” Hilf, owner of Industrial Sales and Marketing (ISM), a manufacturer’s representative agency based in Brentwood, Missouri, died January 9.

Hilf, a well-known veteran of the distribution industry, established ISM nine years ago. He had previously worked for the Abrasives Solutions Group, Garryson Corp. and Anderson Brush-Wilton Corp.

He is survived by his wife of 36 years, Karen (Stapf); his son, Jake and wife Angela; daughter, Emily and husband John; and son, Sam; grandchild Morgan Mae; sisters Judy and Jean (Patti); and brother Jim. 109

2016 Regional Meetings

LOOKING TO TAKE A ROAD TRIP? Check out GAWDA’s Regional Meetings Regional Meetings are held throughout the Spring and Summer at nine beautiful locations across the United States, with thought-provoking presentations and opportunities for networking and social events. As they become available, each meeting’s agenda is posted at www.gawda.org and in our e-newsletter GAWDA Connection, and includes registration and contact information. So gas up the car, grab your colleagues and go!

HOUSTON, TX Location: University of Houston Hilton Hotel Speakers: • Chuck McConnell: 32 years with Linde, Union Carbide, Praxair; Center for Energy and Environment Initiative • Dr. Adam Perdue: The University of Houston, C.T. Bauer College of Business; Institute for Regional Forecasting • Kenny Houston: Retired Houston Oilers player, Washington Redskins Defensive Back. NFL Hall of Famer

APRIL 18-19 Other Events: • • • •

Reception Golf Outing GAWDA Update Ship Channel Area Tours

Contact: Ashley Madray; amadray@gasinnovations.com

Gary Degenhardt; gary.degendardt@chartindustries.com

DESTIN, FL Location: The Sandestin Golf and Beach Resort Details: TBD

MAY 2-3 Contact: Jenny McCall; JennyM@wescoweld.com James Cain; JCain@Atlaswsco.com

ATLANTIC CITY, NJ Location: Bally’s Atlantic City Speakers: TBD Other Events: • Reception • Wine & Brewery Tour: A behind-the-scenes tour of the

winery and property, including educational “Vines to Wines” talk, tastings, and a souvenir glass. Tour of the

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MAY 11-12 state-of-the-art Cape May Brewery, plus a tasting and a souvenir pint glass! At Cape May Distillery, enjoy a tour about rum-, gin- and bourbon-making, plus a tasting.

• Golf Outing at the nationally acclaimed Atlantic City Country Club Contact: Michael Trueba Jr., MPT Industries; mtrueba@mptindustries.com

Spring 2016

2016 Regional Meetings

Coeur D’Alene, ID

Maumee Bay, OH Seven Springs, PA Kansas City, MO

North Stonington, CT Atlantic City, NJ Gettysburg, PA

Destin, FL

Houston, TX

SEVEN SPRINGS, PA

• GAWDA Update • Golf Tournament • Sales Workshop with professional sales coach Jason

Location: Seven Springs Mountain Resort Speakers: TBD Other Events: • Young Professionals Event and Lunch • Sporting Clays Event • Reception and Mountain BBQ at the Resort’s

legendary ski bar, The Foggy Goggle

MAUMEE BAY, OH

JUNE 20-22

JULY 13-14

Kleid offering a Track Selling Workshop. Jason is known for his work with Chart Industries, nexAir, and others. Breakfast and lunch will be provided.

Contact: Abydee Butler Moore; abutler@butlergas.com

COEUR D’ALENE, ID

JULY 20-22

Location: The Sandestin Golf and Beach Resort

Details: TBD

Details: TBD

Contact: Ken Wilson; ken.w@a-lcompressedgases.com

Contact: John DeHoust; jdehoust@eleetcryogenics.com Bob Ranc; Robert@weldcoa.com

GETTYSBURG, PA NORTH STONINGTON, CT AUG 9-10 Details: TBD Contact: Ken Wilson; ken.w@a-lcompressedgases.com

AUG 24-25

Location: Country Inn and Suites; The Links at Gettysburg Speakers: TBD Other Events: • Party in the Parking Lot: Country Inn and Suites

KANSAS CITY, MO

SEPT 12-13

Details: TBD Contact: David Hanchette; David_Hanchette@Praxair.com Spring 2016

Music, food, games, and a great time networking • Golf Outing: The Links at Gettysburg • Silent Auction: proceeds donated to

GAWDA Gives Back Contact: Douglas Morton, Eleet Cryogenics; dmorton@eleetcryogenics.com 111

News from GAWDA Headquarters

New Members GAWDA is pleased to welcome the following companies that recently joined the Gases and Welding Distributors Association as new members. For more information about the benefits and services available to members, please contact the Association at 844-251-3219 (Stephen Hill) or visit www.gawda.org.

DISTRIBUTOR MEMBERS G.E.T.S. WELDING SUPPLIES

100 Eastland Road Dothan, AL 36303-9756 (334) 793-1551 Dewayne Buckelew, Owner jskinner.getswelding@gmail.com

JOHN’S SALES AND SERVICE INC. 709 South Grandview Ave. Odessa, TX 79761 (432) 582-2373 www.johnssalesandservice.com Mark Lewis, President mark@johnssalesandservice.com

TIM’S SOUTH TEXAS LLC 4055 East Main Street Uvalde, TX 78801 (830) 278-4647 www.timssouthtexas.com Tim Ligocky, President tim.l@timssouthtexas.com

MOORE OXYGEN SUPPLY

266 New Airport Road LaGrange, GA 30240-4054 US (706) 884-1706 www.mooreoxygen.com Candace Neighbors Operations Manager candace@mooreoxygen.com

SUPPLIER MEMBERS ALL SAFE GLOBAL INC.

25443 Fallbrook Avenue Wyoming, MN 55092 (612) 332-3473 www.allsafe.net Eric Friedman, Vice President, Sales efriedman@allsafe.net

IACX ENERGY LLC

5400 LBJ Freeway, Suite 460 Dallas, TX 75240 (972) 960-3210 www.iacx.com Brian Witt, Director of Business Development brianwitt@iacx.com

112

PROTOCOL ENVIRONMENTAL SOLUTIONS 105B, 81 Golden Drive Coquitlam, British Columbia V3K6R2 Canada (604) 464-0660 www.innercrete.com Floyd Wandler, President floyd@innercrete.com

RASCO FR

6015 Skyline Drive Houston, TX 77057 (800) 472-7265 www.rascofr.com Tarek Shahia, President ramzi@rascofr.com

Spring 2016

Industry News

Industry News ALDREDGE JOINS LINDE BOARD; KEEN NOW BOARD ADVISOR

The Linde Distributor Association (LDA) board of directors has appointed Emmett Aldredge III, co-president of Arc3 Gases, of Dunn, North Carolina, as a member of the board. Aldredge had been board advisor for several years.

Mark Falconer, LDA co-chairman and president of Minneapolis Oxygen Company, headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, said that Aldredge “has a wealth of experience as an independent distributor, which will be invaluable to the association in our efforts to strengthen and increase our services to our membership.” Bryan Keen, president of Wilmington, Delaware-based Keen Compressed Gases Company, replaces Aldredge as board advisor and will assist the Board with business management activities.

ALEX KENNEDY NAMED RED BALL OXYGEN CEO

Red Ball Oxygen, a distributor of compressed gases and welding supplies headquartered in Shreveport with 19 locations Alex Kennedy in Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas, has appointed Alex Kennedy as chief executive officer. Larry Kennedy, a 36-year veteran of the company (who is Alex Kennedy’s uncle) has assumed the role of chairman at Red Ball.

Alex Kennedy succeeds his father, Gary Kennedy, and his grandfather, Craig Kennedy, as the third generation to lead the family-owned firm. Alex worked summers at the company and in 2008, joined it full time. He has served as account manager, store manager, vice president of operations, and most recently, vice president Gulf Coast, presiding over the company’s largest growth market in Houston.

O.E. MEYER NAMES CFO, THREE VICE PRESIDENTS

Brian Belden

The board of directors of O.E. Meyer Co., of Sandusky, Ohio, unanimously voted Brian Belden the company’s chief financial officer based on his previous position as controller. Belden has been with the company more than 10 years.

Spring 2016

Eric Wood

Terry Clevenger

Kevin Turner

Eric Wood has been promoted to vice president of industrial sales, having previously served as industrial sales manager. Terry Clevenger has been promoted to vice president of the propane division. Clevenger has held several leadership roles within the Ohio Propane Gas Association and is soon to become the group’s president and then chairman. Kevin Turner has assumed the responsibilities of vice president, sales and marketing for the hospital division.

Before joining O.E. Meyer, Turner had a lengthy career with Cardinal Health.

NORCO CREATES ESOP TO MAKE EMPLOYEES OWNERS

Norco Inc., the nation’s largest privately-owned manufacturer and distributor of industrial and medical gases and supplies, has created an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), providing a 35 percent stock benefit to its 1,200 employees.

Established in 1948 by David Nordling, Nordco was acquired by Larry Kissler in 1968. Jim Kissler, Larry’s son, is Norco’s current CEO. The 1,200-employee company operates 75 branches in seven Northwest states. Norco also owns and operates two air separation plants that produce oxygen, nitrogen and argon gases.

WELDSHIP ACHIEVES ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFICATION

Weldship Corporation, a manufacturer and supplier of industrial and specialty gas and chemical trailers and containment products, has received ISO 9001:2008 certification for the design, manufacture and requalification of industrial gas, electronic specialty gas, and chemical transportation and storage equipment. Weldship President Bob Arcieri noted, “We are proud of our entire Weldship team for the effort they have consistently put forth resulting in this achievement.”

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Industry News

TWO GRADUATES NAMED HOBART INSTITUTE INSTRUCTORS

Ryan Stenger

Thomas Oliver

Hobart Institute of Welding Technology (HIWT) has appointed two of its graduates to be skill instructors at the Troy, Ohio, school.

Ryan Stenger attended HIWT in 2012. He worked for Johnson Controls in Pennsylvania for three years before moving back to Ohio, and now lives in Tipp City. Thomas Oliver is also a 2012 HIWT graduate. He worked for Hobart Filler Metals while attending HIWT and upon graduation moved to Virginia to work for Newport News Shipyard. He now lives in Dayton.

Sales in 1987. He began his career in the welding industry with Harris Calorific five years earlier then decided to go out on his own, said Greg Testa, national sales manager for Direct Wire & Cable.

OZARC GAS NAMES GANDY VICE PRESIDENT OF PROPANE SALES

Ozarc Gas Equipment & Supply, Inc., of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, has named Doug Gandy vice president of propane sales. Gandy joins Ozarc Gas with 18 years Doug Gandy in the propane industry. He has been district manager and service center general manager with Ferrellgas Inc., where he directed the sales and business development strategies for 20 branch locations in Illinois and Indiana.

BREWER JOINS AWISCO SALES TEAM

KB SALES JOINS MATHEY DEARMAN TEAM

KB Sales has joined the team at Mathey Dearman, assuming the territory formerly covered by the late Derek Milner, the Tulsa, Oklahoma company has announced.

With more than 20 years of experience working with national accounts specializing in the welding, construction, utility, industrial and safety markets, KB Sales is managed by partners Gene Kramer and Pete Barnable. They now cover the states of New York, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont.

ACE INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS NAMES TWO SALES REPS

Don Brewer

Don Brewer has joined AWISCO as an accounts manager, announced AWISCO President and former GAWDA President Lloyd Robinson. Brewer has been in the gases and welding supply industry for more than 24 years.

METRO WELDING SUPPLY NAMES IVES TO MANAGE PLANT

Brian Ives has been named manager of Metro Welding Supply’s new Ypsilanti, Michigan fill plant. He worked previously as the night shift manager at the company’s plant in Detroit.

Ace Industrial Products, a manufacturer of welding fume extraction equipment, announced the appointments of Richard Stentz, of Stentz Associates LLC, and Jon Brower, of Brower Sales LLC, as new manufacturer sales representatives. They will cover the areas of Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, Washington D.C. and New York City and its surrounding counties.

The two bring more than 40 years of combined professional experience in the welding, safety and industrial supply marketplace.

Troy M. Saylor has joined CryoVation as director of business development.

Saylor comes to the Hainesport, New Troy M. Saylor Jersey, company with more than 11 years of experience at Inweld Group, and has a technical background in welding and electronics, noted CryoVation Vice President Ryan Boyd.

GORMAN SALES REPRESENTING DIRECT WIRE PRODUCTS

GAS INNOVATIONS AND HALDOR TOPSOE TO MARKET CARBON MONOXIDE

Direct Wire & Cable Inc., of Denver, Pennsylvania, has announced that Gorman Sales will be covering the Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana regions for the Direct Wire product line. Gary Gorman started Gorman Spring 2016

CRYOVATION APPOINTS SAYLOR DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Gas Innovations of La Porte, Texas, and Haldor Topsoe of Copenhagen, Denmark, have announced plans to market carbon monoxide production via Haldor Topsoe’s new electrolytic technology named eCOs. This technology provides 115

Industry News on-site production of carbon monoxide using carbon dioxide as feed stock.

The eCOs plant is a containerized unit that offers safe and on-site, easy-to-operate supply of carbon monoxide. Gas Innovations will feature the first production facility at its La Porte headquarters in March and jointly with Haldor Topsoe market future production modules to chemical and pharmaceutical industries.

CP INDUSTRIES ANNOUNCES SALES & MARKETING CHANGES

Kevin Collins, vice president of sales and marketing at CP Industries of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, has retired, and the company has hired George H. Kevin Collins Thompson to serve as its new sales and marketing VP. Collins will continue as an independent consultant with CPI, where he has been for more than 30 years. Thompson previously worked for U.S. Steel throughout the United States George H. Thompson before joining CPI, a maker of seamless high-pressure vessels.

KAPLAN NAMES PAPANIA TO REGIONAL SALES POST

Beau Papania

Beau Papania has been appointed Northeastern regional sales manager by Kaplan Industries of Harrison, Ohio. Most recently Papania served as central regional sales manager for Sherwood Valve. Prior to that he was with Superior Products.

MOORE JOINS MIKE CHARLES AND ASSOCIATES

Michael Moore has joined the Mike Charles and Associates team, Mathey Dearman has announced.

Moore started his welding industry Michael Moore career in 1990 with Lincoln Electric in research and development and manufacturing and technical sales. He also worked at ESAB in territory, regional and national sales as well as business development. His latest position was vice president of sales with ArcOne. Moore has experience in automation, robotics, welding processes, and respiratory and safety. He is a member of the GAWDA Safety Committee.

116

EXOCOR ADDS U.S. WAREHOUSE, NAMES REID TO SALES AND MARKETING POST

Exocor, based in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, announced the opening Jerry G. Reid of a new 6,000 square-foot office and warehouse in Amherst, New York, to serve its growing base of U.S. distributors, Paul Kinsella, president and COO, announced.

Exocor also has named Jerry G. Reid as director of U.S. Sales and Marketing. Reid has 20 years of experience in the industrial distribution arena in both the U.S. and Canada. He most recently was regional sales manager, Central U.S.A and Canada for Taylor-Wharton Cryogenics, and before that, spent 10 years with Praxair U.S.A.

WESTERN ENTERPRISES APPOINTS DEEKEN SALES AND MARKETING VICE PRESIDENT

Jason Deeken has been named vice president of sales and marketing for Western Enterprises in Westlake, Ohio. Deeken is responsible for maintaining and growing Western’s customer relationships through its portfolio of industrial, medical, manifold, Jason Deeken and helium products. Deeken has more than 15 years of experience in business-to-business marketing, healthcare marketing, product development and sales strategy.

HOLLAND JOINS CTR AS SALES ENGINEER

Brian Holland

Brian Holland has joined CTR Inc. as a sales engineer. Holland has been working within the cryogenic industry since 2005, where he started as a sales manager. He brings with him an in-depth knowledge of stations, fill plants, and pumping systems.

BUG-O SYSTEMS MADE MASTER DISTRIBUTOR FOR SPINARC WELDING TORCHES FOR U.S. AND MEXICO

Bug-O Systems has reached an exclusive OEM and distribution relationship for SpinArc welding torches covering the United States and Mexico. Weld Revolution has also appointed BUG-O Systems as a global distributor for their product line. Bug-O Systems provides mechanized welding systems that are fully integrated with Weld Revolution’s patented SpinArc welding torches.

Spring 2016

Industry News

O.E. MEYER SUPPORTS ARMENIAN AID EFFORTS

O.E. Meyer Co., of Sandusky, Ohio, has donated supplies to George Asadorian and the Armenian Relief Society. They include nebulizers and CPAP machines that will be dispersed to Neonatal Association of Armenia and the Cystic Fibrosis Center, noted Craig Wood, Weld Division president.

Asadorian first became involved with this philanthropy shortly after the 1988 Earthquake in Armenia. O.E. Meyer Co. has given concentrators and other medical supplies to the Armenian Relief Society for the past 20 years.

Craig Wood (left) and George Asadorian

M & A SCORECARD NEXAIR EXPANDS IN FLORIDA AND GEORGIA nexAir LLC (Memphis, Tennessee) has merged with 23 Praxair Distribution Southeast (PDSE) branches in Florida and southeast Georgia with the acquisition of two Praxair Distribution, Inc., branches in eastern Georgia.

Praxair Distribution Southeast was formed in 1997 as the result of a joint venture between Praxair Distribution and the George W. Fowler Company, owned by the William B. Porter family. The family took an ownership interest in nexAir with the closing of this transaction. PDSE is now a wholly-owned nexAir subsidiary.

TECH AIR COMPLETES ACQUISITIONS OF NEW YORK, TEXAS WELDING SUPPLY FIRMS Tech Air has completed the acquisitions of New York-based Ravena Welding Supply and Texasbased Hereford Welding Supply.

Owned by CI Capital Partners and Tech Air management, Tech Air has completed 17 addon acquisitions, boosting its Northeastern U.S. presence while establishing hubs in the Southeast, Southwest and Western United States, said Miles Dempsey Jr., CEO. Tech Air now services its customers through 33 branch and fill locations.

The Connecticut-based company is a distributor of industrial, medical, and specialty gases and related welding supplies.

Spring 2016

NEXAIR BUYS AIR LIQUIDE LIQUID CO2, DRY ICE PLANT nexAir has purchased Air Liquide’s liquid carbon dioxide and dry ice facilities in Millington, Tennessee. nexAir assumed operations of the plant at the end of January and is operating the business through nexAir Carbonic, its wholly-owned subsidiary. The organization’s five employees have joined nexAir’s Tennessee operations, said Kevin McEniry, CEO.

AIR WATER INC. ACQUIRES TAYLORWHARTON, RENEWS PARTNERSHIPS Air Water Inc. acquired all shares of Taylor-Wharton Malaysia SBN BHD in February. As part of the transaction, the company will use the Taylor-Wharton name and logo. Eric Rottier was named chairman and CEO. Taylor Wharton has extended agreements with Eleet Cryogenics, Inc. and Ratermann Manufacturing, Inc. Eleet will be the company’s exclusive stocking and sales channel for micro-bulk tanks over 1,000 liters, standard atmospheric and hydrogen bulk tanks for the United States and Canada with stock at Eleet’s facility in Ohio.

Ratermann will be the exclusive stocking partner for liquid cylinders and beverage carbonation. Ratermann will service the distributor and end-user market and Taylor-Wharton will cover sales to the major gas producers with order fulfillment by Ratermann.

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New Products, Services & Technologies HARDFACE TECHNOLOGIES INTRODUCES HARDFACING WIRE

Hardface Technologies, a business unit of Postle Industries of Cleveland, Ohio, has introduced a new hardfacing wire for knives used for tire, plastics, carpeting, and recyclables shredding.

Non-Cracking Postalloy Ultra-Shred 580 metal-cored hardfacing wire is a martensitic tool steel-type alloy with numerous tightly packed carbides.

Deposits are slag free and exhibit a hardness of 57-61 Rc, single. Multilayer weld deposits exhibit wear characteristics that Ultra-Shred 580 would be expected

from a chromium carbide hardfacing product, and with proper procedures, weld layers are non-cracking and are easily rebuilt.

The alloy properties create a wear-resistant cutting edge even under high heat conditions created by extreme friction, noted company President John Postle.

Postalloy Ultra-Shred 580 has proven to be an exceptional alloy to hardface tire shredding knives, and it also has seen great success with other recycled materials, such as PVC, HDPE and other plastics, wood, textiles, natural and synthetic fibers, leather and rubber, Postle added.

LINDE ANNOUNCES CO2-ASSISTED GAS INJECTION MOLDING

The Linde Group has announced the results of its first plastics series production using its PLASTINUM® GIM C system, a gas-injection molding technology that uses carbon dioxide (CO2) instead of nitrogen (N2) to deliver improved

2016 INDUSTRY EVENTS 1-3 AIWD Annual Convention // Charleston, SC

APRIL

3-5 GAWDA Spring Management Conference // Savannah, GA 18-19 GAWDA Regional Meeting // Houston, TX 2-3 GAWDA Regional Meeting // Destin, FL

MAY

11-12 GAWDA Regional Meeting // Atlantic City, NJ 17-19 IWDC Sales & Purchasing Convention // Indianapolis, IN

JUNE

JULY

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER NOVEMBER

5-8 LDA Annual Membership Meeting // Orlando, FL 20-22 GAWDA Regional Meeting // Seven Springs, PA 13-14 GAWDA Regional Meeting // Maumee Bay, OH 20-22 GAWDA Regional Meeting // Coeur D’Alene, ID 9-10 GAWDA Regional Meeting // North Stonington, CT 24-25 GAWDA Regional Meeting // Gettysburg, PA 12-13 GAWDA Regional Meeting // Kansas City, MO 25-28 GAWDA Annual Convention // Maui, HI 11-14 IWDC Owners Meeting // California 23-27 IOMA’s 2016 Annual Meeting // San Diego, CA. 14-16 FABTECH // Las Vegas, NV

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Spring 2016

New Products, Services & Technologies cooling capacity.

After a pilot installation at Engel Formenbau und Spritzguss GmbH for the series production of high quality plastic parts, the technology has Flow Sensor been shown to reduce cycle times by up to 36 percent, Linde reports.With CO2’s higher density, greater thermal capacity and expansion cooling ability during depressurization as against N 2, it allows the manufactured part to cool much more quickly, delivering substantially better efficiency, the company said. The core of the new technology is a CO2 compressor control module for precise pressure regulation and a dedicated injector optimized for CO2.

The system was jointly developed by Linde’s Gases Division and German high-pressure equipment specialist Maximator.

RAILROAD FROGS AND CROSSINGS PRODUCTS INTRODUCED

Postalloy FrogTuff has been introduced by Hardface Technologies, a business unit of Postle Industries.

Said to be perfect for manganese steel railroad frogs and crossings, the product is offered as a flux-cored wire as well as a flux-coated electrode. The flux-coated electrode operates on either AC or DC reverse polarity. Its tensile strength is 125,000 psi; yield strength is 80,000 psi; it has a 34 percent elongation with hardness as deposited is 15-22 Rc and work hardens up to 55 Rc. The fully austenitic weld deposit quickly becomes tougher and harder very quickly and it will not spall or mushroom under severe impact, such as hammering or pounding from continuous rail traffic, the company notes.

The company also introduced a self-shielded flux cored wire version of the product named Postalloy FrogTuff-FCO, a high alloy austenitic manganese welding wire for FrogTuff joining and buildup. The product has a tensile strength of 135,000 psi, a yield strength of 90,000 psi and a 30 percent elongation. The hardness as deposited is 20 Rc and work hardens up to 50-55 Rc. Spring 2016

ALM INTRODUCES NEW POSITIONER

ALM Positioners, based in Rock Island, Illinois, has introduced a new 10,000-pound capacity Model MHL1P single column positioner.

The product features 68.5-inch vertical travel in 35 seconds; pendant controlled four-horsepower, column-mounted hydraulic unit for lifting and lowering; solenoid controlled safety pawls; 360 degree CW or CCW rotation; rotator with 267,200 inch pounds of torque; and 48-inch base. It is offered as a dual motor rotator and ALM Single Column Positioner Variable Frequency Drive (variable speed rotation .75 to 2.3 RPM) as well as a single rotator. Also available is the MHL1P 3 axis single column 6,000-pound capacity positioner.

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Advertisers Index ABICOR Binzel USA..................................................79

The Harris Products Group.......................................IFC

Acme Cryogenics.....................................................33

Hobart Institute of Welding Technology.....................105

AIWD......................................................................38

INOXCVA.................................................................25

ALM Positioners.......................................................45

Kaplan Industries ....................................................18

American Standard Manufacturing............................42

Kobelco ..................................................................95

American Torch Tip Company....................................63

The Lincoln Electric Company.....................................6

Ameritanx ...............................................................84

McDantim................................................................81

AmWINS Program Underwriters.................................16

Mercer Industries.......................................................3

Anthony Welded Products...............................1, 48, 86

Metal Man Work Gear Co..........................................62

Applied Cryo Technologies......................................114

Midalloy................................................................108

Arcos Industries......................................................IBC

NorLab ...................................................................40

Astaras......................................................................9

Norton Abrasives......................................................87

BTIC America Corporation.........................................78

Prism Visual Software...............................................36

Bug-O Systems........................................................41

Ray Murray Inc.........................................................24

California Cylinder Corporation..................................97

Reelcraft Industries..................................................67

Carborundum Abrasives...........................................27

RegO Cryo-Flow Products.........................................10

Catalina Cylinders....................................................98

Rotarex North America..............................................89

Cavagna North America............................................58

SafTCart..................................................................43

CGW-Camel Grinding Wheels....................................49

Select-Arc, Inc........................................................ BC

Chart Industries.......................................................72

Sherwood Valve.......................................................34

CPV Manufacturing..................................................56

Tech Air...................................................................47

CTR..........................................................................5

Thermacut.............................................................103

Cyl-Tec....................................................................12

Thermco Instrument Corp.........................................83

DataWeld................................................................54

Uniweld Products.....................................................79

Elco Enterprises.......................................................97

Veite Cryogenic Equipment & Service Corp................22

Evergreen Midwest...................................................76

voestalpine Bรถhler Welding.......................................20

Exocor.....................................................................36

Watson Coatings......................................................92

FasTest ..................................................................98

WDPG Business Insurance/The Horton Group...........105

FIBA Technologies....................................................80

WEH Technologies....................................................92

Flange Wizard........................................................102

Weiler Corporation...................................................39

Gas Innovations/WWS..............................................90

Weldcoa..................................................................31

GAWDA...................................................................74

Welding Alloys.........................................................32

Generant Company..................................................93

Weldship Corporation...............................................77

Gullco International..................................................84

Winton Products Co................................................119

H&H Sales Company................................................93

Worthington Industries............................................102

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Spring 2016

Arcos Delivers Solutions to Stainless Steel Alloy Welding Challenges.

Arcos Industries, LLC offers over 100 stainless steel electrode products to handle the countless array of demanding welding applications that challenge you daily. Our reputation for exceptional quality and outstanding service ensures that you can depend on Arcos to provide you with the finest in bare wire, covered and tubular stainless steel alloy welding electrodes.

Discover for yourself how Arcos stainless steel alloy electrodes can help you solve your critical welding problems. Call us today at 800-233-8460 or visit our website at www.arcos.us.

“Hands down, Select 78 is the best wire I’ve used in 25 years.”

Marc Young Advantage Steel and Construction Ironworkers Local 3

Select-Arc, Inc. has introduced Select 78, a new T-8 product that has shook up the self-shielded electrode market. Select 78 (E71T8-H8) provides superior arc stability and low spatter emission enabling high deposition rates whether in-position or out-ofposition. In contrast to other T-8 wires, Select 78 has a broad operating window that allows both experienced and apprentice welders to utilize it with ease. It offers exceptional weldability and

produces an excellent bead shape with easily removed slag.

Select 78 is expertly designed for use in critical applications such as ship and barge construction, structural steel erection and bridge fabrication.

Better yet, as Marc Young attested, “Being an ironworker means putting in long hours and laborious days under any known conditions to build North America. Select 78 allows you to put in an honest day’s work instead of a hard day’s work.”

Now discover for yourself why Select 78 sets the new standard in T-8 welding electrode technology.

Call us today at 1-800-341-5215 or visit our website at www.select-arc.com.