Apr 28 2008 11:04AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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Last week I had a conversation with the national vice president for a nationally-known building material manufacturer as his company had just signed up with my company, Builder Partnerships, LLC. The purpose of the call was to indoctrinate him and his team to the specific details of our program and to lay out a strategy to convert our builder members to his product offering.

At the end of the conversation I asked him what his goals were with us and what did he want to get out of the first year. Well, I got the usual response, “x” number of conversions representing “y” amount of dollars, etc. Then he paused and said “I also want to better understand the confusion that exists in the supply chain and to eliminate the supply chain noise that exists today.” You see, this executive is well aware that there exists a lack of cooperation by the members of the supply chain and that this lack of cooperation adds “noise” or inefficiency to the workings of the supply chain.

We also concluded that a great amount of this noise results from a lack of trust between the players, particularly with the distributor or contractor. These two players don’t want to lose control of their builders and do not want the manufacturer involved with “their” builders. This attitude worked during the housing surge as manufacturers spent their time with the large public builders but times have changed. Today manufacturers are reaching out, trying to establish relationships with small and medium-size builders to balance their builder portfolio. So the bottom line is that distributors and contractors are going to have to become better team players.