The Soft Pitch

I know everyone’s glued to news the economy and US elections, but here’s a couple pieces of Avnet news that might have slipped under the radar.

We celebrated the Grand Opening of the Avnet Global Solutions Center this week.  I talked about this earlier when the “big move” was made, bringing inventory and equipment together in Chandler, Arizona at a state-of-the art facility.  Much of it is automated, even the fork lifts that automatically move down the racks and positions the warehouse employee exactly where he/she needs to be to pick parts from the shelves to fill an integration order.  They don’t have to steer or adjust height, the fork lift is connected to the order system through a wireless interface sending part location information to the fork lift.  All the operator does is push on the “go” pedal.  With this system, the operator can’t go to the wrong location for a part – the fork lift won’t allow it.  Avnet’s Logistics team estimates about a 30% productivity improvement in picking parts as a result.  Innovation like that helps us to continue to become more efficient and improve accuracy.

Another piece of news is that Avnet CIO Steve Philips was appointed as the head of the board for the Arizona Technology Council. The council promotes the growth and professional development in Arizona’s technology sector, through networking and educational forums. 

While Al was tending his wounds from the Cubs loss (so sorry Al), I was visiting a small town in Oregon – Ashland. Home to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland has about 20,000 people … and the largest Shakespeare Festival in the country (it runs 10 months and draws thousands).  My daughter was on fall break and since she is a Shakespeare fan, off we went for four days.  We saw four plays and only one, Othello, was presented in the “traditional” Shakespeare style preserving language, costumes and setting.  All the others, including a hilarious production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that involved a hippie VW bus from the 60’s, were true in spirit but adapted for a fresh approach.  In fact, the production of A Comedy of Errors was so far from the original (think western town + musical), that it was barely recognizable as Shakespeare.

Speaking of barely recognizable (okay, so I know this is a big leap, but transitioning from watching Puck cavort across the stage to sitting in my windowless office is also a big leap), before I left, BusinessWeek published a cover story on how counterfeit components were finding their way into US military applications. When I saw the cover, I thought, “Wow – if they only knew what we were doing.”

What the BusinessWeek story left out was how we and others are working against counterfeiting. As a global distributor, we have the processes in place to prevent that very thing from happening.

We announced in July that we were one of the first distributors to be certified under China’s new “Reliable Electronic Component Suppliers” or (RECS) system. Then, this week our team in Asia announced “Avnet combats counterfeiting concerns for small-to-medium sized manufacturers in China.”  For those of you who follow supply-chain news and study how players in an industry collaborate to drive efficiency or in this case authenticity, you might be interested in how Avnet and others worked together on the Shenzhen International Components Center (ICC) “Transaction Hall” that was announced this week.  As part of this, Avnet launched a sales & service counter in the ICC that allows us to conduct transactions on the spot of small quantities guaranteed to be genuine components.

With all of the bad press about counterfeit parts, bad milk and tainted toys, isn’t it nice to know someone’s got the integrity to do the right thing and guarantee what we’re selling really is what we say we’re selling?

Oh and as far as that “barely recognizable Shakespeare thing”? The really interesting part is that the ideas Shakespeare wrote about 400 years ago still came through in the modern productions. Set in an urban, gang-torn city, Coriolanus still invited scrutiny of one man’s struggle to rationalize his personal beliefs with the political will of others. Personal integrity – it’s still at the heart of things.

As a follow-up to my post “Ahead of the Power Curve”  we won!  Check out the press release:

September 24, 2008 – Avnet, Inc. Named an Honoree in Computerworld’s Inaugural “Best Practices in Green IT” Awards Program

Avnet Recognized for Its Commitment to Improving Energy Efficiency in Its Data Center

PHOENIX — Global technology distributor Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT) today announced that IDG’s Computerworld selected the company as an Honoree in the inaugural “Best Practices in Green IT” Awards Program. Computerworld’s “Best Practices in Green IT” Awards Program identifies and acknowledges excellence among early adopters and industry leaders in the green IT movement. Avnet received its award in the “Green IT in the Data Center” category based on its three-year project to create a more energy-efficient data center.  more

As VP of PR for Avnet, I often get to hear about great stuff the team is doing around the world before everyone else. Or sometimes I just get a news clip after the fact about something that happened in the UK or India or Malaysia. Either way, almost every day I’m reading something about Avnet activities very far from my personal home base here in Phoenix. It reminds me of just how “flat” our world is and how connected we are these days.  (By the way, we post the highlights of our news coverage daily to the Press Room and you can subscribe to it via RSS.)

So, I’m sharing a couple news clips I got on things Avnet’s doing that never saw a press release or were never promoted beyond a single country’s borders, but I thought worthy of sharing:

This first story comes from the UK where we recently upgraded a facility called

 THE [resource] . THE [resource]  houses a variety of technologies where resellers can come in with a customer and do live demonstrations in an upscale environment.  We’ve had this facility for almost 5 years and it was previously dedicated only to IBM but now we’ve  expanded the technology available for demos.  Interestingly enough, we also opened an IBM-focused center for demos recently in Malaysia and a few years ago one in Poland. We’ve also got similar centers in the US and undoubtedly in many places I don’t know about it. What strikes me most is that we are working to leverage scale and scope and offer the same or similar services in local markets with a twist usually to meet local needs.

The second story comes from India where we recently announced we’ve expanded our global footprint with IBM with several other suppliers soon to follow .  This comes on the heels of our acquisition of Ontrack in India and the team is working quickly to deliver a wide range of value-added solutions and services in that market to resellers. Hardly a week goes by where we’re not announcing a new supplier, a new service, a new technology being offered somewhere.  Expanding by geography, technology and suppliers is a key part of our growth strategy.

I didn’t mean this to be the IBM post, but the truth is we’re one of IBM’s largest value-add distributors in the world – but I could also say the same of HP and Sun. The story of expansion just keeps going – we’re expanding with our other leading suppliers as well – NetApp, EMC, etc. Maybe instead of a global footprint it should be a global boot print. We keep growing. It’s kind of like that movie, “The Never Ending Story.”   Each time you open the page, the story takes a new turn and continues.

Last week we learned that Avnet has been named as a finalist in Computerworld’s Green IT awards for “Green IT in the Data Center.”  “Green IT in the Data Center.”

We’re in with some pretty big company (IBM and Unisys were also named finalists in our category). But just being named a finalist I think shows a recognition of some things we take very seriously in running our business.

It’s become very cool these days to tout everything “green,” and sometimes we all get ahead of ourselves. So, I’m realistic. Avnet is on a journey to become more of a green company, we’re not perfect, but we’re looking at everything from coffee cups in our break rooms (we switched from Styrofoam to paper and regular old mugs) to use of plastic water bottles (we recently stopped using them at our large corporate functions) to big things like energy conservation.

Our journey in the data center began in 2005, when we needed to expand. The IT team worked closely with our facilities management team. Some things we did to get ahead of the power consumption curve:

ü     Using virtualization we consolidated our servers and decreased power consumption per image by 44 percent.

ü     We replaced “down flow” air conditioners with new ones which were 20 percent more efficient.

ü     We added more insulation. For a data center located in Arizona, where temperatures can reach more than 115 degrees, this investment resulted in a more efficient building, lowered cooling costs by $7500 per year, and increased the longevity of cooling systems and the roof.

ü     We replaced 250 T12 lighting ballasts with more efficient T08 ballasts.  This reduced Avnet’s lighting costs by 30 percent.

Winners will be announced September 18^th at Computerworld’s Green IT Symposium.  I have my fingers crossed.