OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Choosing an Organization Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Identify an organization and situation you want to study over the remainder of the course.
2. Describe the organization and situation.

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

Describe your organization.

Lawson Products is distributor in the maintenance, repair and operations industry (MRO).
Lawson supplies hardware, chemicals, safety supplies and small parts to the maintenance
professionals in various industries. Someof them industries served include construction
equipment rental, hospitals, commercial truck fleets, counties and municipalities, and military.
Essentially we service any industry that has a maintenance manager or a mechanic. Lawson
employees approximately 1,100 sales representatives servicing the entire United States from
their corporate headquarters in Chicago and satellite warehouses in Georgia, Texas, and Nevada.

Describe how Describe your role in the organization (it can be internal or external).

My role within Lawson Products is an internal role as an account manger/outside sales

representative. I cover a fairly large territory consisting of four counties in central Florida
including the Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater markets. My primary tasks are to mange
existing acoounts by servicing their locations and actively prospecting to increase new account
and share of wallet within existing ones. It is my responsibility to stay up to date with new
products and also to monitor competitors products in order to offer the best option for my
customers needs.

Describe the situation. (see the Canvas instructions for details, especially about how your
situation will be analyzed from five different perspectives over the next five modules)

The recent COVID-19 pandemic and the ensueing lockdowns, supply chain issues and
economic slowdowns have made the sales landscape exceedingly challenging. Even though
Lawson prides it self with at least 30 percent goods made from the USA, many of the core
ingedients or components come from overseas. With that being said, we were not the only
company struggling to service locations and to have a consistent supply of goods. Last year, we
as a company purchased one of our competitors (PM) and this meant we brought on 200
additional sales representatives along with their management team and diverse product portfolio.

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 With the increase of the additional 200 sales representatives came a new set of
challenges. A major issue I have been running into is the chain of custody for accounts in which
we have a two sales representatives servicing. For instance, I have been supplying all of the
consumable hardware and other small relatively inexpensive parts for a large concrete plant. I
have been servicing ths account for approximately two years. Prior to merger of Lawson and
PM, PM was supplying the hydraulic fittings and hoses for the large machines. So now that we
have become one company we both are visiting and supplying the same customer. The tricky
part is for the customer who doesn’t know who to talk about what when an issue arises. The PM
representative sells a very expensive high dollar item and I sell more items to the customer but
they are significantly less expensive. As of now our corporate wants everybody to “stay in their
lane”, but at some point one representative will be in charge of the account. This means that one
of us will have to “lose” that account which is likely to be me because the items I sell bring in
kless revenue to the company.

Reference or References