The Industrial Distribution Program at Texas A&M University conducted a two-day short course, "Distributor Profitability and Growth Strategies," in Shanghai, China, May 27-28.
The program was offered by the Thomas and Joan Read Center for Distribution Research and Education, a center in the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES). The course was held at East China University of Science & Technology in Shanghai.
The course was taught by Dr. F. Barry Lawrence, director of the Read Center Leonard and Valerie Bruce Endowed Chair Professor in Industrial Distribution at Texas A&M, along with senior research staff members Pradip Krishnadevarajan and Senthil Gunasekaran.
The course covered topics in optimizing distributor profitability, sales and marketing optimization, and optimizing distributor growth and market share. The course was attended by sales, operations and management professionals from various distribution companies.
For more than 30 years, the Read Center has been the leader in wholesale and industrial distribution research and education. The Read Center is the only distribution focused research center on any university campus in the U.S. The center has been offering distributor sales, operations, and finance courses since the early 1980s. Each year, the center conducts more than 25 professional development programs at both on-campus and off-campus locations all over the U.S. The center has been conducting both open-enrollment and custom programs internationally since the 2000s in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, UK and the United Arab Emirates. Currently, the center offers three open-enrollment programs in El Salvador per year and plans to offer two open-enrollment courses in Qatar in September 2013.
The Read Center’s professional development programs are designed to increase distributor’s competitive advantage and profitability. They focus on relevant and actionable education through proven methods and tools. The Read Center’s educational programs are based on research consortia and applied industry projects in various lines of trade. The knowledge generated by these industry-funded consortia, projects and professional development programs enhances the undergraduate and graduate education by bringing real-world distribution problems, case studies, and examples to the curriculum.
For more information, please visit http://readcenter.tamu.edu.