Under its new corporate structure with Staples and equity owner Sycamore Partners, top-tier business products distributor Essendant is finding new ways to help its thousands of resellers be more competitive in an increasingly digital and competitive market, Essendant president Harry Dochelli says in an interview.
It’s been nearly a year since Essendant Inc., which relies heavily on ecommerce as a distributor to thousands of resellers, was acquired by Sycamore Partners, a private equity firm that also owns Staples Inc. It’s proved to be a positive change, Essendant president Harry Dochelli said in a recent interview.
“I’m highly encouraged by our new relationship with Sycamore and Staples,” he said. “It gives us a much stronger financial position we haven’t had as a stand-alone company, and going forward we’re capturing the synergy of companies under the umbrella of Sycamore Partners. It gives us a much better position in the market.”
Harry Dochelli, president, Essendant Inc.
Those synergies range from sharing supply chains and sourcing goods more efficiently to using more digital commerce tools to help resellers interact with their customers in more personalized and efficient ways. These developments follow Essendant’s divestiture in October of its industrial products division, which handled automotive, safety and industrial supplies through ORS Nasco, Medco and Nestor. Essendant sold these units to One Equity Partners.
Targeting a 98% next-day order fulfillment rate
The shift away from industrial products now has Essendant, formerly known as United Stationers, focusing more on—and expanding—its core markets of office supplies and janitorial/sanitation, or JanSan, products. As a top-tier distributor with thousands of channel partners—distributors, wholesalers and dealers, often referred to overall as “resellers”—Essendant works in several ways to help these companies better operate with ecommerce, enterprise resource planning and other business software systems. read the rest here