For more than 60 years, the Industrial Distribution Program has been providing the industry with cutting-edge professional development certificate programs. The Read Center offers 1.5 to 5 day programs enabling high potential distribution professionals and executives to transform their company data to meaningful, actionable, and growth-driven results. Below is a ful list of courses and their descriptions, so that you can find the right one for you and your business.
Executive Session on Distributor Competitive Advantage
If you are planning to set your firm on a sustainable profitable growth journey while sharpening competitive advantage in your marketplace, this program provides you a blueprint to achieve the same. If you are not planning to grow your firm above-average industry growth, this program content may not align with your strategic intent.
Distribution Human Capital Development
This program is designed to help distributors develop a competitive advantage through human capital development. Making human capital a competitive advantage for organizations is a long-term process that requires a clear vision, holistic thinking, strategic planning, carefully crafted strategies and multi-party collaborations. This course is based on the Optimizing Human Capital Framework and produced as a result of a two-year applied research and extensive fieldwork. The research efforts generated a diverse set of best practices that focus on five key Talent Practices.
Distribution Manager Certificate Program
Distribution has evolved so rapidly and branch managers are being tasked with additional responsibilities in areas of operations and finance. Managers have been forced to become entrepreneurs and no longer manage just the day-to-day operations. Often, managers in their transformed role see themselves making critical business decisions but most times are not equipped with the right tools and best practices for decision making.
Intensive Customer Stratification
Best-in-class distributors categorize customers based on various factors, but customer stratification has long been an unexplored area for most distribution companies. Not anymore. Customer stratification is a critical business process that every distributor should adopt and execute well to achieve greater profitability. When you educate your staff about the customer stratification best practices, they will have the tools, knowledge, and motivation to establish and sustain this important business process.
Intensive Inventory Management
This program deals with STOCK processes such as inventory stratification, forecasting and replenishment. You will get hands on experience performing inventory stratification, analyzing demand patterns, applying various forecasting methods, evaluating forecast error to choose the best method, and deciding ‘what to order?’ and ‘how much to order?’
The New Science of Customer Service
The topics addressed in this course are service growth and differentiation, customer service attributes, conflict resolution and service recovery, lifetime value calculations, service strategy and stratification, service culture building blocks, service standards and innovation, employee satisfaction drivers, talent selection, empowerment and flexibility.
Optimizing Business Analytics
A 2‐day executive education program, offered by TJR Center for Distribution Research and Education, Texas A&M University
Optimizing Channel Compensation
This course will help you determine how service models are changing, how distributors are being compensated for new processes, capture best practices in manufacturer–distributor collaboration, examine and document distributor compensation models in terms of traditional product margin (distributor-driven), fee for service (customer-driven), incentive based (manufacturer-driven), etc.
Optimizing Distributor Profitability
For years individual firms and researchers have been compiling many best practices for distributors. These practices have been time tested, and a “best” approach is now known for almost every imaginable distributor activity. Though each best practice has been analyzed in isolation and projections about their impact on financial statements have been made, no one has attempted to take all relevant best practices and determine the effect of implementing the most significant ones on the firm’s ROI and net profit. How profitable can a distributor be when all of the potential best practices are implemented? The perfect distributor would not only implement the most significant best practices, but would do so by optimally deploying resources that include people, inventory, cash, facilities, and equipment. This program and the research behind it aims to determine the path to creating the perfect distributor–to see how profitable a distributor can become.
Pricing Optimization
Forward-thinking wholesaler-distributors who strive for above-average returns in the “New Normal” by leveraging pricing optimization best practices that are rooted in sound analytics must attend this course. It’s time for distributors to up their game on pricing. The issue of margin erosion will never end if you do not get creative—first with pricing methods, and second with value proposition.
