CDW Restructures Sales Force

It&'s a similar model to what CDW already has with state and local government, education and health-care customers, Edwardson said at the Raymond James IT Supply Chain Conference in New York Tuesday.

“This is a move we should have made a couple of years ago,” Edwardson said. “We did it in public sector. It&'s a big change for us, but something we need to do to align our sales force and our vendors' sales force.”

For example, vendors&' field-sales reps may routinely have to work with hundreds of account reps in New York City, Edwardson said. “This will take some time for those well-estallished relationships to transition. It will be a number of years. We&'re not going to do it too quickly,” he said.

CDW plans to bridge the compensation plans of sales reps to ensure a smooth transition for customers, Edwardson said. He expected the number of regions to be less than the public sector, which has about 10, he added.

Meanwhile, CDW said it will more effectively serve those customers, particularly those in the West Coast, with a new 513,000-square-foot distribution center in Las Vegas, Edwardson said.

“This is a significant investment. We debated about doing it the way we did with our Vernon Hills center, which was initially 150,000 square feet. We added 100,000 square feet, then another 200,000 square feet. There were disruptions regularly. We thought a better thing to do was to build for the next five or six years without having to expand every couple of years,” he said.

The warehouse complements CDW&'s 450,000-square-foot facility in Vernon Hills, a suburb of Chicago, and features a dramatically improved operations capability, Edwardson said. "It is only 10 percent larger but, thanks to new automation, when it is fully built out our hope is to ship twice as many boxes per day as our current capability,” he said.

The Las Vegas center also features a configuration center three times the size of its current location, he said. Also, California customers now have access to next-day ground delivery, Edwardson said.

“We can&'t do that from Chicago. It reduces shipping costs to customers. Now they have to pay express rates for next day from Chicago. We&'ll also be closer to incoming products. Much of what we sell comes from Long Beach [Calif.] harbor. We&'ll be able to get things into our network more quickly,” he said.