It's Not About Me

• Cross Reference Litigation – Defending a company’s corporate assets might not be thought of as a customer benefit but it is essential that a company can defend and preserve its patents and intellectual property rights if they are to survive to serve the customers’ best interests. R anco entered the replacement Wholesale market soon after manufacturing their first control in 1929. Ranco published its first major cross reference in 1949 with successive updates and expansions over the years. Several major controls companies attempted to challenge the origination of Ranco’s various cross reference guides but were unsuccessful in the courts as all litigation was resolved in Ranco’s favor. The court noted that our use of the newly introduced VisiCalc spreadsheet enabled us to display to the court a continuous trail of part numbers and model numbers for each manufacturer via each succeeding issue of our cross-reference guides (each of which were protected under applicable copyright laws) and was instrumental in deciding these cases in Ra nco’s favor. • Systems or Solutions – In the ten years I was employed by Ranco Controls, they changed their order entry and shipping systems three times! On the last occasion, Ranco purchased all 21 modules of the newly introduced COPICS from IBM; during a February training session in Chicago, I asked the IBM instructor how many modules of COPICS did the typical customer buy when they launched a conversion to COPICS…his answer was four or five modules. Obviously, our local Ohio IBM sales rep made his bonus for the year and must have gotten promoted as we never saw him again! I later stated to Ranco management that continually migrating to different computer systems was of little value for the company and even less value for the customer. Systems are ofte n sold as “solutions” to what ails a company when there are far more basic issues that need to be addressed. I was soon searching for a third company as I had been offered a position at Ranco running their Logistics and Planning operati ons, but I did not feel this was a “good fit” for what I wanted to do for the rest of my career. Recognizing that it would be unlikely for me to find a job that encompasses Marketing Communications, Market Research and Customer Service, I elected to take a job running Customer Service in Memphis, TN at American Electric. While I ended up taking a drastic cut in pay, this change in employment would turn out to be an excellent career move. • Signature Service -- When I joined American Electric in February 1990, they had just embarked on a bold new initiative called Signature Service . As their new Customer Service Manager, I would soon learn that part of my job would be developing the internal systems necessary to support this new initiative. At the time American Electric was owned by Forstmann, Little & Co ., a private equity firm, specializing in leveraged buyouts (LBOs). At its peak in the late 1990s, Forstmann Little was among the largest private equity firms globally. This was perhaps a good thing as American Electric , at the time, was not held to the same standards as a public company focused only on maximizing current profits. Clyde Moore, the CEO, was a unique individual who thought “outside of the box”. The originators of Signature Service … Mike Ga mbino, Tom Hudak and Ann Jaehn had a vision to provide a level of service to their customers that had never ever been experienced in the electrical industry. My Third Company…

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