DisTribute

Planning Your Marketing Strategy for 2012

Have you started planning your marketing strategy and programs for next year? You’ll want to get going if you haven’t so you start 2012 in a strong competitive position, with plans in place and budgets approved — not scrambling to make decisions and feeling behind from the beginning.

The Marketing Maven at Global Spec, who specializes in marketing for the industrial sector, offers a two-part series to help you evaluate your current marketing efforts, focus on your objectives for 2012, and choose the right programs to achieve your goals.

The first article offers strategies for gathering information and getting an early start on formulating next year's marketing plans. The five key strategies the Marketing Maven emphasizes:

• Start by analyzing the past
• Engage your sales team
• Study industry trends
• Understand your company’s business plan
• Make a wish list

This month, the Marketing Maven offers five marketing ideas that will help position you to achieve your goals.

• Align marketing with customer behavior
• Implement measurable marketing
• Invest in emerging marketing channels
• Create marketing plans for different budget levels
• Reach out to media partners today

To help you accomplish the above, she also provides Seven Digital Trends Industrial Marketers Should Know, and if your goal is to reach new markets, she provides some advice for that as well.

Tips and Tricks for Microsoft Excel

Many of us use Microsoft Excel in our jobs, but never progress past the basic functions and the handful of features we are familiar with. Learning just a few additional tips can make you more productive and allow you to access your information in a more streamlined way.

This article by Barry Moltz for the OPEN Forum lists 10 productivity tips for Excel, including:

• Use the Audit toolbar to graphically trace the cells that are included in a mathematical formula for a given cell
• Use Auto Fill to reduce the amount of time and error when typing days, months or any series.
• Use Sparklines to illustrate trends in a series of values, such as seasonal increases or decreases, economic cycles, or to highlight maximum and minimum values.
• Don't forget you can change the name of the "Sheet" page. Just right click on Sheet 1, and rename it.

For even more tips, check out this article by Seamus Bellamy, Paul Lili, and David Murphy for Maximum PC which includes tricks like these:

• If you have a spreadsheet full of formulas and you want to see exactly how you have arrived at the values, use CTRL + ~ to transform your spreadsheet from values to the formulas that constructed them.
• Need to add a line break in a cell to split up your text? Use Alt + Enter.
• Check out the RDBMail plugin if you want to quickly email portions of a worksheet to an Outlook recipient.

And here is a list of tips and tricks from Microsoft itself, such as:

• Freezing panes and splitting panes into multiple worksheets can be useful when you want to work in one pane while information displayed within the other remains static.
• PivotTable and PivotChart reports can help you quickly summarize large amounts of data in a variety of formats.
• Set up conditional formatting to quickly identify important data points such as top-performing salespeople or high-volume customers.

Here's a handy list of shortcuts for Excel 2007 and another for Excel 2010.

The first version of Excel was released in 1985. Here is a timeline depicting the history of Excel. Naturally, the timeline itself was made using a bar chart in Excel with some special formatting. It's a good example of the flexibility possible within this tool.

Tribute Customer Spotlight: Brennan Industries, Inc.

Since 1953, Brennan Industries has provided companies throughout the world with the highest-quality, critical flow components. Headquartered in Cleveland, Brennan Industries has grown to include six distribution centers across the US and Canada and is the largest independent manufacturer and supplier of hydraulic connectors in the United States.

CEO David D. Carr has led the company since 1959. The grandson of Russian and English immigrants, his lifestyle exemplifies the strong work ethic and traditional family values that his parents and grandparents instilled in him at an early age. In 2001, he was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor for spearheading fund raising initiatives for local education, health care and the arts and his mentorship of start-up businesses.

Highly respected by his customer base, Carr has established solid relationships, giving Brennan the competitive edge. He has passed that trait onto his son, David M. Carr, now the president of Brennan Industries.

Brennan Industries began by manufacturing standard tube fittings and adapters. As their customer's needs expanded, so did the depths of their lines. Soon Brennan was supplying O-ring face seal fittings and flareless bite-type fittings and as more foreign equipment entered the marketplace, they began providing international and DIN metric fittings.

Quality is what sets Brennan apart from other hydraulic and pneumatic fitting sources. “Quality is our most important offering,” states David M Carr. “As an ISO 9001:2011 registered company, we're committed to quality in everything we do. From the design and engineering…through the entire manufacturing process…to the final inspection of parts, we adhere to the most stringent quality control practices to assure superior products.”

What's changed over the years is the number of products offered and the ways they get those products into the hands of customers. Expanding their offering to nearly 28,000 different styles and sizes, they've also grown their distribution to meet the demands of their customers.

Brennan Industries credits its responsiveness to the fact that it’s still a privately held company with key principals active in the day-to-day operations of the business. With the reputation as an industry leader, they pride themselves on their outstanding service levels in meeting the needs of their customers.

This responsiveness is demonstrated by the opening of new distribution centers in Ontario, Canada and Shanghai, China. “The Canadian distribution center allows us to better serve our Canadian customers by saving them money and making our products more convenient for them,” said David M. Carr, president of Brennan Industries.

“The new Chinese distribution center is one way Brennan Industries is continuing to grow its global reach. With the new distribution center along with the sales office in Ningbo, China, Brennan is meeting the great domestic demand China has for hydraulic fittings and adapters.”

In response to customer’s needs, Brennan Industries has introduced its new Brennan Black® coating, the most advanced protection against rust and corrosion. "The Brennan Black coating offers the highest industry standard and is the answer for protecting systems and ensuring longevity in the most corrosive and harsh environments enabling customers to save money by protecting operations and reducing replacement costs," states David M. Carr.

Brennan Industries does more than provide a wide variety of products; they offer more knowledge about those products. Their years of experience and technical expertise go a long way toward choosing the right fittings for your applications. A long time Tribute customer, the staff at Brennan Industries have also provided their expertise on the industry by serving on Tribute’s Program Review Committee. As their tagline states, Brennan is The Logical Choice for Critical Flow components.

Brennan Industries, Inc.
Cleveland, Atlanta, Los Angeles,
Dallas, Seattle, Toronto & Shanghai
Toll Free: 1-888-331-1523

Good Sources for Technical Skills Training

Previously on this blog we’ve addressed the current lack of workers trained in the specific skills needed for today’s advanced and higher tech manufacturing and fabrication. We’ve written about a few of the programs promoting education for a skilled workforce and in changing the perception of the skilled trades.

 Recently, Michele Nash-Hott addressed this problem in her article for the Huffington Post, What’s Being Done to Address the Lack of Skilled Workers? She mentions the partnership between Cincinnati based manufacturer Mag IAS LLC and local community colleges that we touched upon previously – a great solution for companies that want a reliable source of skilled labor.

The compelling component of the article, however, was the announcement that the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) has acquired Tooling University LLC (Tooling U) which provides online training to more than 1,200 manufacturing companies and 400 educational institutions. With more than 400 unique titles, Tooling U offers a full range of content to train machine operators, welders, assemblers, inspectors, and maintenance professionals. If finding skilled labor is a struggle for you, a partnership with Tooling U may be beneficial to your business.

Tooling U offers a free Workforce 2021 Readiness Assessment which gives manufacturers, fabricators, systems integrators and distributors the opportunity to assess their own capabilities in the face of challenges they will need to solve before they are confronted with the severe skilled workforce shortages predicted by 2021.

Another option for workforce training is offered by The Fabricators and Manufacturers Association, International (FMA). The FMA champions the success of the metal processing, forming, and fabricating industry. FMA educates the industry by a wide variety of online and on-site programs, webinars and certifications.

As our skilled workforce nears retirement age, smart businesses will take steps to ensure a source of equally skilled replacements.

3DSI Observes National Cyber Security Awareness Month

Tribute partner, 3Delta Systems, Inc. (3DSI), a leader in online credit card processing solutions and a pioneer in safeguarding confidential payment data through tokenization, is observing National Cyber Security Awareness Month by issuing a set of business best practices for protecting customer credit card account information and minimizing corporate exposure to online payment scams.

Entitled "10 Business Best Practices for Fighting Credit Card Theft and Fraud," 3DSI's tips consists of tried-and-true tools and techniques for companies to use in detecting and deterring online thieves from stealing sensitive payment data from their computer systems. The best practices are available for Download here.

"Given the ingenuity of cyber criminals and the sheer volume of electronic business-to-business (B2B) payment transactions, someone - somewhere - will inevitably break through your company's front-end access control and authentication safeguards," said Aaron Bills, founder and chief operating officer of 3Delta Systems.

"A sound business payment security system shouldn't merely detect intrusions," Bills explained. "It should also plan for 'graceful failure' - a strategy that assumes, if one safeguard fails and a perpetrator gains access to one part of your computer network, other countermeasures will be in place to contain the attack, render it less harmful or lock down confidential data so it's worthless to hackers."

Study after study shows that failure to protect sensitive payment data from a breach leads to massive financial costs, customer defections, lawsuits and loss of reputation. According to the Ponemon Institute's latest U.S. Cost of a Data Breach Study, data heists during 2010 cost companies an average of $7.2 million, up 7 percent from 2009.

To help businesses stay secure, 3DSI launched Payment WorkSuite®, an easy-to-use platform built from the ground up to save enterprises money on payment processing costs, improve their productivity and protect sensitive information from prying eyes.

The company also pioneered credit card tokenization technology in 2003 called CardVault® that enables merchants to exchange their customers' confidential card data for randomly generated payment "tokens," a process that safely replaces real card numbers with a string of characters which then become useless to would-be hackers. Merchants use only the token key reference for each customer transaction while the real card data remains offsite at 3DSI's secure processing centers.

Tribute, Inc. and 3Delta Systems have partnered to give Tribute customers the ability to manage, tokenize, store, authorize and settle payment transactions in real-time via the Tribute Software System and TrulinX Software. For more information regarding cyber security visit the National Cyber Security Alliance's website StaySafeOnline.org.

Saving Energy & Money with Fluid Power

The FPDA Motion and Control Network, along with the International Fluid Power Society (IFPS) and the National Fluid Power Association (NFPA), will host the Energy Efficient Hydraulics & Pneumatics Conference November 15-17, 2011 at the Sheraton Chicago O'Hare Airport Hotel in Rosemont, IL.

This first-of-its-kind event is targeted to, and will attract engineers and technicians from, many fluid power end-use markets, both mobile and industrial, who seek information on how to design and maintain energy efficient hydraulic and pneumatic systems.

Energy Efficient Hydraulics & Pneumatics Conference

November 15-17, 2011
Sheraton Chicago O'Hare Airport Hotel, Rosemont, Illinois

Hosted by:
International Fluid Power Society (IFPS)
FPDA Motion and Control Network (FPDA)
National Fluid Power Association (NFPA)

Click on link for more info

Tribute Customer Spotlight: Neff Power

Neff Power began as an industrial distributor of fluid power components and controls. Founded in 1965 by John and Loretto Murphy, Neff Power has added to its product mix over the years and today is a full-service automation solutions provider, handling electrical control, motion control and fluid power.

Today, Neff Power has evolved into a unique organization with an exceptional mixture of sales, engineering services, manufacturing, and fabrication capabilities. Offering full-service automation solutions for hydraulics, pneumatics, electrical control, motion control and 80/20, Neff Power’s highly trained sales engineers provide solutions tailored to each specific customer application.

Their coverage area is central and eastern Missouri and central and southern Illinois. Recently moving to a new larger office featuring a state-of-the-art training facility in Earth City, Missouri, Neff Power has also updated their website with easy to find technical information and videos on their product lines.

A leading distributor of 80/20, Danfoss, Gems Sensors, Miller Fluid Power, Omron, Sick, Turck Works , Versa, Wilkerson, among many others on their line card, Neff Power became a Numatics distributor partner in January 2011. 80/20 Inc.'s premier distributor in Eastern Missouri & Central/Southern Illinois for over 12 years, Neff Power's team of highly-trained 80/20 specialists are ready to offer their experience and design assistance to help solve any challenge. You can also contact their 80/20 team to request a visit from the demo van, including the incredibly popular "Gurney of Wonder".

Neff Power not only provides full service automation solutions, they ensure that their customers are trained and educated in the products through onsite seminars, such as the recent seminar discussing Advanced Safety Sensors & Perimeter Guarding presented by Sick, and through their blog, which provides articles of interest and technical information. You can also follow Neff Power on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

A Tribute customer since 2008, Neff Power utilizes TrulinX Software to manage their business efficiently. Members of AHTD (Association for High Technology Distribution) and FPDA (Fluid Power Distributor’s Association), Neff Power leverages their industry expertise and superior customer service to become the premier provider of automation solutions in the Midwest.

Neff Power, Inc.
13750 Shoreline Drive
Earth City, MO 63045
Phone: (314) 298-2300 / (314) 727-6200
Toll-Free: (855) 727-6200
Fax: (314) 298-2395

Handy Application for UPS Shipping by OzLINK

TrulinX software comes with complete integration of UPS and FedEx, but some customers wanted a way to quickly estimate UPS freight charges without the trouble of going to the UPS website.

During a meeting with his UPS rep, Tribute customer Kevin Hogarth of Neff Power mentioned that it would be nice if he had a way to estimate UPS freight without taking the time to do the research on the UPS website. The rep suggested he look at OzLINK for UPS OnLine® Tools.

Hogarth loves the application and what he likes about it is that he can see the standard freight charges AND negotiated freight charges just by having the ship-from zip code, ship-to zip code, and package weight. It also has tracking tools and the ability to price out international shipments.

OzLINK is a free application available to any company who ships packages with UPS and can be installed on as many PCs as necessary. The OzLINK “PLUS” package comes with additional features for $15.95 per month.

Here’s what OzLINK says about their services:

With OzLINK, you can quickly and easily track packages, check rates and validate addresses all from within one application. Easy to use, install and maintain, OzLINK Standard is the perfect tool for sales and customer service representatives.

UPS Rating
Rating packages or shipments has never been more efficient! OzLINK displays all services, rates and delivery commitment times with a single click of a button. For even greater flexibility, OzLINK enables you to see either your UPS negotiated rates or the UPS standard rates.

Package Tracking
Track packages faster than ever! OzLINK allows you to track with standard UPS tracking numbers or by package reference number.

Address Validation
Quickly validate a customer's city, state and postal code to prevent delivery delays and improve customer satisfaction. OzLINK provides you with a confirmation of a good address or a list of suggestions for a valid destination.

Clipboard Integration
Moving data in and out of OzLINK is also simple. All three functions within OzLINK come with their own Data In and Data Out buttons. These buttons are best described as "intelligent cut & paste" as they move data in and out of the Windows clipboard but are aware of what has been selected on the screen.
For example, when on the address validation screen, Data In will parse an address in the clipboard and place city, state and zip in the appropriate fields. When on the rating screen, the Data Out will move one rate or all rates into the clipboard depending on what is highlighted in the output rate box.

Free Website Tools for Valve Distributors

Today’s savvy manufacturers have added a bevy of useful tools and information to their websites and social media outlets. They know that in this competitive market they have to provide more than product specifications. Most manufacturers can now be found on Facebook and Twitter, with information, handy tutorials and video clips designed to help out valve buyers.

Valve Magazine asked VMA members to share some of what they offer. They found an array of diagnostic and other software, helpful tools such as calculators, and a wealth of informational papers and articles. Valve Magazine took that information and put together a great article with useful information on Sizing Software, Video Libraries and Tutorials, Diagnostic solutions and more.

For example:

• Flowserve has a number of useful tools, including a diagnostic solution for control valves that can be integrated seamlessly into a host control and/or plant asset management system and a tool for selecting steam traps and an accompanying guide.


• Rotork has a sizing guide which allows the correct electric actuator to be selected for all valve types and sizes, taking into account power supply, enclosure types and mechanical interfaces.


• Emerson’s ASCO Valve business has a set of interactive valve sizing programs for liquids, gases and steam, plus a unit conversion calculator and Emerson’s Fisher unit has a series of tutorials on regulators in PDF form.