Ninety days after that Marshall launched MarshallNet, an intranet system to integrate Marshall's internal databases with the outside world. Customers would no longer have to phone or fax to check on orders; the data would be available instantly. Marshall also designed software to analyze a host of competitive issues: time-phased order planning, supply management and demand modeling, account profiling and strategic forecasting -- all imbedded in MarshallNet.
Forty-five days later, Marshall unveiled a companywide installation of Lotus Notes. All 600 salespeople and their managers received high-performance laptops with access to spec sheets and technical information on 170,000 parts. They also got email templates to automate orders, work-flows, and status inquiries. No more typed-up notes to product managers, inside sales assistants, area managers, and engineers.
Why did Marshall move so fast? First, because as soon as Rodin saw Mosaic, he worried that competitors would beat him to the Net. In fact, it was a year before any of his major rivals even launched a Web site. Second, because Marshall's CEO is a fanatic about time -- in particular, the amount of time his people spend with customers. "What if everything were free?" he asks rhetorically. "What would we argue about? Or what if every customer had all the information it needed? What would be the next competitive frontier? Time. It's the currency of the 1990s."
The real power of technology, Rodin argues, is that it frees people to spend more time with customers. He loves doing the math. "Most people have 2,000 working hours a year," he says. "That's 40 hours a week, 50 work weeks a year. People who do a good job with their time spend 800 or 900 of those hours face-to-face with customers.
"That's not good enough," he continues. "There are 8,760 hours in a year -- 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That's 10 times the average person's best effort! Our company goal is to use every one of those 8,760 hours. To maximize every tick of the clock. We want to create a whole new definition of time and space."
At Marshall headquarters, the evidence of success is everywhere. Glass cases display dozens of plaques, clocks, and trophies celebrating Marshall as one customer's "Supplier of the Year" or a supplier's "Top Performer." Hitachi sent two polished steel samurai swords. Siemens sent an ornate porcelain beer stein. Interestingly, there's nothing in the cases from Intel or Motorola, nothing from Hewlett-Packard or National Semiconductor. By unspoken tradition many of America's most powerful electronics suppliers have refused to share shelf space with their Japanese rivals, and chosen their distributors accordingly. That is, until late in 1995, when Marshall once again broke the rules in its industry. "AMD Shares Shelf," screamed the front-page headline in Electronic Buyers News. "Breaking Tradition, Franchises Marshall."
The story deserved the prominence. Advanced Micro Devices hadn't franchised a new distributor in almost a decade. And it had never franchised a distributor that also carried Japanese products. EBN, once so critical of Marshall's pay plan, called AMD's decision "a major coup" and a sign "that the silent code that has acted as a wall between U.S. and Japanese suppliers is starting to crack."
Which is precisely how Rodin plans to keep moving Marshall into the future -- one skeptical supplier or customer at a time, always challenging (and sometimes cracking) the industry's silent code. It's the nature of life in the middle -- for Marshall and for everyone.
"The role of the middleman is going to keep changing," Rodin says. "Suppliers and customers make choices every day about distributors," Rodin says. "The choices can be almost instant: 'I like you, I don't like you.' The challenge is to develop relationships that are continually more meaningful to both sides. We have to provide sophisticated answers to problems our suppliers and customers don't even know they have." c
Curtis Hartman (cphartman@aol.com) is a contributing editor to Fast Company. You can visit Marshall on the web, http://www.marshall.com .
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