At this week’s Rockwell Automation TechLED Rockwell announced a new partnership with Manpower to train (“upskill”) 1,000 veterans per year. The new initiative, reported by Control magazine, is designed to help address the expected shortage in skilled automation staff that […]
Since the beginning of the year, Wendell Strong from Innovative Lighting has penned an exclusive series for ElectricalTrends titled ““Insights into the World of PoE Lighting Technology.” Wendell has been in the lighting industry for “many” years and has used […]
Much is talked about “innovation”. It’s a term that is loosely tossed around and requires a commitment, or perhaps a better term is “mentality”, that is infused into individuals and a culture. It’s a desire to “excel” and, perhaps more […]
Over the past week we’ve spoken to a number of distributors, reps and manufacturers who attended LightFair. From listening to all it appears that LightFair, which euphemistically was called LEDFair a few years ago by many when LEDs first started […]
Earlier this month NAED held its 2017 Annual Meeting in Boston. The meeting attracted a little over 600 attendees. According to one manufacturer there were 339 manufacturer attendees plus service providers, technology companies, marketing groups and other miscellaneous entities … […]
With recent quarterly reports from Rexel, Graybar and AD in addition to the recent WESCO quarterly report, we now have Q1 performance representing about 30% of sales and about 140 distributors. IMARK as well as CED, Sonepar, City Electric and […]
The continued focus on energy efficiency powered by LEDs has fueled growth in the lighting market. For many distributors lighting now represents 30-40% of sales. And the lighting controls market has grown. For the past few years we’ve reviewed Acuity’s […]
There continues to be much discussed in the industry regarding “eCommerce”. Daily we hear about Amazon Business, Grainger and the coming “conquering of the channel” by eCommerce. It almost seems as if everyone expects that the zombies in the Walking […]
For the past couple of years the industrial segment has been “challenged”. Much of this was driven by the decline in the oil & gas market which had a significant ripple effect. Concurrently, a strong dollar hurt exports for many […]
Over the past few weeks distributors and manufacturers are reporting an uptick in their industrial business and, in some cases, a significant increase. The reasons vary from “general optimism” to the increase in oil rigs; from replacing / upgrading aging equipment […]
