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Paul Webster |
Paul Webster, recently appointed UK managing director for Acal Technology and BFI Optilas, talks to Steve Rogerson in our series of interviews for CIEonline. Webster joined Acal as UK managing director for Acal Technology and BFI Optilas in August this year after more than 30 years in component distribution. Before joining the company, he held the position of head of product management at Electrocomponents, where he was responsible for the implementation of electronics strategy throughout Europe and Asia-Pacific and the introduction of more than 60,000 new products. During his career, Webster has held senior level management roles including vice president of marketing for EMEA at Avnet and sales and marketing roles at the Macro Group and ITT Electronic Services. After completing a degree in electronic engineering, he started work for Plessey before moving into component distribution.
1. You recently joined Acal as UK managing director. What attracted you to that position?
I have been in the industry for 32 years. I have been with large distributors. What attracted me here was the specialisation, where you can add a different value for the customer. It was a different challenge for me. I have a knowledge of the franchises and the products and an understanding of what the customer requires. 2. What do you see as the differing roles between the specialist distributor and the more general distributors? It is very much about a knowledge bank. Acal is stacked with specialist business units with high-end knowledge. There are also more general areas such as connectors and so on, but we can buy more into the specialist roles with our knowledge of that segment. We don’t do a broad line card with lots of competing manufacturers offering similar products. We have many lines with no competitors in our range, so we can concentrate on those products. The broad line distributor still has a role but it is different to the ones from the likes of ourselves. They are about offering a broad range of choice with a one-stop shop but without the detailed knowledge. 3. How important is technical support from a distributor perspective, or should that be handled by the manufacturer? It is important from the customer’s point of view. They want an optimum solution for their design problem. There are a lot of good web-based tools that get them going, but when they want to know more about the product or application, that is where the likes of us can play a role because we have the latest knowledge. Most manufacturers don’t have the bandwidth to communicate with design engineers on these levels. They use their web sites to fulfil the first level of enquiries but after that it is about which distributors have the knowledge to share with the customer. The catalogue distributors are not set up for that. 4. You spent many years doing backstage work in amateur theatre. Did you ever consider making that a career? I started doing that at school before I went to university. It was one of the things that gave me an interest in electronics. I looked at the theatre as a career but decided I couldn’t make a lot of money out of it. In my 20s and 30s I still continued doing it an amateur sense but family matters came in and I gave it up. When I go to the theatre with my wife I still find myself looking at how it is all set up sometimes rather than the actual play. 5. This industry among others has suffered from the recent financial crisis. Are we now coming out of this and what needs to be done to ensure we are not pulled back into recession? All the signs are that the business is improving. During the recession, there were customers spending time and effort on new designs and they now need support to bring them to market as it picks up. Now it is about whether the government can support this with investment. They have plans to do this in areas such as alternative energy and smart metering. It is true the government is cutting costs but with things like smart metering where there is a long-term environmental plan I think they will continue to invest in that. The same is true with renewable energy. The investment will be made but how that filters down to the R&D engineers remains to be seen.
