Digitization Making Progress in the Gases and Welding Industry

Digitization Making Progress in the Gases and Welding Industry

BY J.R. (BUZZ) CAMPBELL, KEN THOMPSON, MAURA GARVEY OF INTELLIGAS CONSULTING

Over 700 GAWDA members have returned from May 2021’s Nashville SMC meeting highly motivated and charged with enthusiasm from an extremely successful reunion. This, after a challenging year of individual work and Zoom meetings. Over 240 distributors, 340 suppliers and more than 105 Contact Booths, all willing to face some continuing risk from COVID to bring normalcy back to GAWDA.

In addition to handshakes and face-to-face exchanges, GAWDA delivered on its promise of content and a rich program. Utilizing the enormous amount of inside industry talent, the GAWDA Management Team offered 15 separate Learning Tracks, each choreographed by experienced and talented volunteers from our membership.

Attendees were able to select three tracks, covering topics relating to family ownership succession plans and options, cultural growth, team building, and a cross section of managing disruptions of many varieties and descriptions. Fully a third of the offerings focused on the digitization of many aspects of our businesses. This article will be on those segments.

All gases and welding (G&W) distribution verticals are under intense pressure to adjust to an increasingly automated economy that seamlessly manages all interactions from marketing and from production of goods and services, through delivery, administration & control, and financing through the supply chain to the end-customer. We have chosen the five Learning Track presentations demonstrating the digitization of our business to briefly summarize below.

Will Roberts, President of Roberts Oxygen Company, presented “Make Your Computers & Machines Do the Work.” Will walked his audience through the Roberts journey to remove as much paper as possible from every transactional point and function. When automated internally as well as with those functions facing the customer and trading partners - hours saved, costs reduced, and efficiencies gained can all be measured. Will convincingly showed that automating the wide range of processes in the supply chain improves every aspect of performance from order-taking, product delivery, invoicing, and payment.

Red Ball Oxygen’s Craig Harris, Senior Vice President of Operations, presented “Keeping Score in Distribution” discussing the role of digital technology in successful filling, mixing, delivering, and recording complex elements of gases operations. Fill room operations, specialty gases formulations and recipes, blending and incubating data are all integrated into the new Red Ball ERP Platform. That includes telemetry at the user site tied to perpetual or vendor managed inventories, cylinder and asset tracking, as well as distribution software managing delivery driver/truck routing and a service disruption occurrence. Craig showed some experiences from a trucking safety view and some interesting software tracked examples of distracted driving that led to improved distribution management.

Colleen Kohler, President of Noble Gas Solutions said, “We Now Get CRM!” and described a litany of benefits gained through implementing a sophisticated CRM (Customer Relations Management) platform. She stressed the fact that data is key to any successful business understanding and operation; and that recording the information regarding customer preferences, responses, and actions and then displaying it across our company’s organization permits the entire team to better focus on quality customer service and often reducing costs. It also creates more effective market intelligence and keeps the sales team geared up for retention of existing business and the creation of new profitable accounts.

Dave Healzer, Cee Kay Supply’s Director of Procurement, addressed the daunting task of “Changing Your ERP Without Taking Years Off Your Life.” Selecting and implementing a new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Platform is never a pleasant experience even under the best of circumstances. However, Cee Kay management recognized that their business model

had changed significantly from a predominately hardgoods and equipment business to gas production and distribution/ services with big differences between bulk and packaged gases. Recognizing those big changes, it was apparent that their ERP was not designed to manage the new combinations of complex product and functional tasks. They also understood that migration of their existing and potential clients into a world of B2B exchanges required a new systems platform that would seamlessly handle the new and emerging complexities of the new portfolio of products, applications, and delivery and service requirements. In addition, they recognized the new complexities of automating the supply side of hardgoods and the expansion of their delivery and service side of gases and interacting digitally with both suppliers and customers. Yes, not an easy task, but it has been accomplished with the entire Cee Kay team accepting the challenge of planning and executing with a goal of excellence as the driving factor. In addition to taking his audience through the “why, what, and how” of the strategy and implementation of the change, he dwelled on the key factors of pitfalls, risk assessment, and mitigation as well as the “what to expect” when changing such an important part of Cee Kay’s business, one that just could not fail.

In their presentation on “Implementing Ecommerce - From Inception to Launch & The Roadmap to Get There,” Glenn Bliss, President, and Amy Dardis, Director of Marketing and Business Development, outlined General Distribution Company’s strategy, implementation pathway, and key success factors considered in their strategy, implementation, and performance in the new area of B2B (and B2C) positioning their G&W distribution channel and businesses. Of note, General Distributing serves a diverse market, including the presence of sophisticated clients preferring a B2B pathway for the conduct of business. The management decision to move forward with the Omnichannel approach required a collaborative effort of many digital specialties providers who previously may have been unknown to each other. The General Distributing ‘story’ describes the process they embarked upon to bring together supporting suppliers and coordinate a degree of cooperation that has been remarkedly successful.

These and many of the other 15 presentations are on the GAWDA website. Back to the meeting itself, Abydee Butler Moore’s challenge at the Opening Session was, “Take Home Enough from the Content offered to unquestionably have paid for your trip here,” and “Enjoy our REUNION as a bonus.” Abydee, GAWDA volunteers, and staff - Well Done! We will see you at some GAWDA Regional meetings this summer and in Colorado Springs in October.

AN ANNIVERSARY

As J. R. Campbell Associates, Inc. (JRCI) celebrate its 40th Anniversary, we congratulate others among our colleagues recognizing their own Anniversaries. We are all part of a remarkable industry, full of talent, experience, and eager to help each other provide products and services of excellence.

JRCI had its beginning in 1981 when J. R. (Buzz) Campbell concluded 19 years with Air Products and AGA Burdox (now part of Linde) and began providing independent marketing, operations, and analysis services to many of the international and US gas and technology players. CryoGas International was started in 1989 and sold to Gasworld in 2013. In addition, JRCI started a gas industry M&A firm with Leaders LLC in 2000. Intelligas Consulting emerged in 2013 following the sale of CryoGas to emphasize the firms focus on consulting. Today, Intelligas Consulting is one of the lead gas industry consulting firms with Maura Garvey and Ken Thompson important parts of that management partnership. Maura has been working with Buzz for 25 years and provides over 40 years of experience, offering in-depth analytics of industrial, medical and specialty gases including developing proprietary models on industrial gases including company financial, market share, and market segment data. She has also written over 100 articles on the industrial gas industry. Ken brings 60 plus years forward with a background in gases manufacturing, distribution and wholesale industry ownership, and best practices coordination and mentoring to some of the industry’s larger regional packaged gases companies. Ken is also transitioning from 25 years of mentoring BIG, the select group of G&W distributors who concentrate on improving business excellence and best practices. Together, the Intelligas group represents over 160 years of industry specific experience.

Today, a primary focus of Intelligas is on the digitalization of the specific performance factors of the U.S. G&W distributors’ supply chain – for both gases and hard goods. It is clear to all that generational progress requires an omnichannel approach to rapidly changing marketing and supply chain strategies. While we have been moving in the direction of increased automation, our experiences and that of the world generating from the huge disruptions from Covid, have greatly accelerated the development of automation and digitization in our industry. For Intelligas Consulting, we firmly believe the combination of technology improvement and experience is a winning formula and are endorsing the advancement of digitization and will assist that those developments.

The GAWDA SMC in Nashville was both timely and especially important.