Austin Hardware & Supply, Inc. has reached an agreement with Tuma to be their United States distributor of heavy and extra heavy duty drawer slides. 

While Austin Hardware has supplied heavy duty drawer slides for many years, Tuma’s slides add to that offering, giving Austin the broadest offering of drawer slides to industrial and wheeled vehicle markets including the fire, rescue, and emergency vehicle industry as well as the utility and service body markets.

Austin Hardware & Supply, Inc. has received Patent No. US 10,004,331 B2 from the United States Patent and Trademark Office for the company’s Front Drawer Release (FDR).

The FDR was invented by engineers Mark Jeffries and Rusty Smith in 2009, and a patent request was filed in 2011. It was designed as part of a complete system to easily latch and unlatch the drawers in heavy duty industrial drawer systems used in vehicular applications.

Launching a product is not as simple as creating it and releasing it into the world. Without a solid plan, bringing a product to market can prove impossible. In fact, Harvard research shows that there are over 30,000 new products launched every year, but over 80% of them fail. It’s safe to say that getting a product to market is far from guaranteed.

Romeo, Mich., April 17, 2018 - L&L Products and Austin Hardware& Supply have jointly entered into an agreement for Austin Hardware & Supply to become an official distributor for L&L Products. Austin Hardware & Supply will focus on providing heat cured tapes, composite panel stiffeners, in addition to traditional adhesive and sealant technology. They provide a national network of warehouses, have the ability to provide Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) Services, and can strengthen the customer-vendor relationship by supplying adjacent technology for doors and enclosures.

In an economic era of perpetual uncertainty, coupled with consistent increases in shipping costs, it's incredibly vital to exploit as many action plans as possible to lower freight costs. Fortunately, the number of viable strategies to do this may be more abundant than you realize.

While it has been around for over a century, within the industrial supply sector, vending technology has been one of the fastest growing markets in about the last half-decade to help improve inventory management.

The internet is replete with examples of how to leverage Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to improve the sales of your business. However, a popular social media platform which is too often ignored is Instagram.

Granted, working with a format which primarily promotes products and brands using pictures can seem challenging at first, particularly depending on your industry, but when done correctly, a well-curated Instagram page can be a phenomenal brand awareness and sales generation platform.

A CRM is not just “another software installation.” It is a powerful engine that should be the front-facing tool for Management, Inside/Outside Sales staff, Engineering, Marketing, and Customer Service. Focusing on the “front-end” processes and user adoption can and will help with the CRM’s return on investment. It should NOT be used as a micromanagement tool or feel like a “big brother.” When implemented correctly, the system will run smoothly and give a company a competitive edge.

The benefits of marketing automation in the B2B space are impossible to deny nowadays. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’re sure to have at least heard of it. If you’re serious about taking your business to the next level, marketing automation adoption may just be the best strategic move you could make this year. More than half* of B2B Fortune 500 companies have started using marketing automation. The biggest businesses in the world clearly see the immense gains that can be made by automating their marketing efforts. To understand more, let’s consider the advantages of marketing automation.

In the past, warehouse operations were highly dependent on dozens of trained employees operating expensive loading and shipping equipment. Compared to the modern era, the 20^th-century warehouse industry work was error-prone, relatively expensive, and labor intensive.

What's more, anticipated technological developments in the industry are prone to drastically increase warehouse operation productivity and reduce costs in myriad ways.