THE INTERVIEW SEPTEMBER 2019
BEYOND
THE BROCHURE
Manufacturing Management sat down with Pete Malpas,
managing director of RS Components Northern Europe, to
discuss outsourced maintenance, region-specific demands
and why the company is now more than just a catalogue
BY CHRIS BECK
When injury curtailed Pete
Malpas’ dream of becoming
a professional sportsman,
he fell back to his first love –
engineering. A design engineer by
background, Malpas has worked
on everything from underwater weapons systems
to packaging machinery. Discovering a passion
for automation led him to 14 years at Festo, seven
years at IMO Precision Controls and eight years
at Brammer, before joining RS Components as
managing director in November last year. Part of
his remit is to reposition the company as a leader
in the MRO distribution market.
Manufacturing Management: How are you
looking to reposition RS Components?
Pete Malpas: Like everyone, I had a perception
of RS before I joined the company. Wherever
I’ve worked, we had the RS Catalogue – in fact,
when I first started selling, I tried hard to get
our products into the catalogue. It’s only once
you get a look behind the curtain that you really
get to see the organisation and its potential. RS
has a fantastic reach in terms of the number
of customers it serves. The business has gone
through different iterations,
from a global to a regional level,
which in itself means it had
become a little inward-focused
and didn’t service the customer
as well as it could have done.
The senior management
team decided to change that
and put the customer back at
the centre of everything. The
company has moved away from
a global structure and towards a
more personal, localised focus.
You have to understand your
market: a UK customer will
likely want different things to
one in the Far East, for example.
It’s important to centralise
everything around one key
theme. The ‘bread and butter’
of distribution – buying,
stocking and selling – was in
place; doing the extra bits that
customers today are asking
for was the real challenge.
How do we bring value to the
customer? How do we move
away from being a box-shifting
distributor to a company that
understands its customers and
the markets? That’s the journey
we’re on at the moment – trying
to implement all that into an
81-year-old business with a lot
of legacy and brand awareness
is going to take time.
MM: How do you decide
what a customer in the UK
would want compared to
one in the Far East?
PM: It depends on the
customer’s maturity; in the UK
we have a very mature market
with a lot of well-established,
long-standing customers. In
other markets, we are not as
mature. Countries like South
Africa, for instance, are further
back on the curve. For that
reason, there are things we
can offer to our UK customers
that we can’t yet for overseas
ones. We talk to our customers
a lot to understand their
challenges and needs. We are
the knowledge partner for CIPS
and provide them with insight
around, in particular, MRO.
It’s important to engage with
our customers’ problems and
find solutions for them. There
tend to be three key challenges:
simplifying the finding and
buying of ‘stuff’; simplifying
inventory controls; and improve
plant efficiency.
MM: What are the key
trends in Europe and the
UK that RS is focused on?
PM: E-procurement is really
coming to the fore. About six
years ago, RS decided to stop
producing the catalogue and
encourage people to go online.
At the time, that was almost
unheard of. Now, though, it
looks like a smart move. We’re
seeing more people doing more
activity online. That’s changed
the whole digital nature of the
Six
years since RS
stopped producing
its catalogue
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