D&H Distributing’s Mission: ‘To Keep Our Economy And Our Country Going’

“There’s a little bit of triage. Right now, demand is outstripping supply, so we’re doing everything possible to increase the supply and then get the products to the partners to help them meet their end-user needs,” Dan Schwab, co-president of D&H Distribution, told CRN.

“To Keep Our Economy And Our Country Going”

D&H Distributing is on the front lines of keeping the country at work, even as many employees are being told to work from home. The surge in demand for products in the PC ecosystem has put pressure on distributors to obtain and move product at a time when labor and product shortages are becoming the norm.

“It’s important that partners communicate with us and we’ll do our best to prioritize and share availability,” Dan Schwab, co-president of D&H Distribution, told CRN. “There’s a little bit of triage. Right now, demand is outstripping supply, so we’re doing everything possible to increase the supply and then get the products to the partners to help them meet their end-user needs.”

Schwab said the company has taken a number of steps to keep solution providers supplied with products that will meet their end-customers’ needs. They are also quickly building solutions and educational content for MSPs around business continuity and collaboration with solutions like Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, Intermedia and RingCentral to assist MSPs in moving their business customers to telework environments. And they are offering promotions on cloud solutions that will make the products and services more accessible to MSPs and VARs.

D&H has quickly built a mini-task force to help create relevant solutions integrating hardware, software, cloud and DaaS, according to Schwab.

All of this while keeping the health and safety of D&H workers at the forefront. The company has 116 workers with multiple members of the same family who work there.

“We’re really trying to make sure that we are creating an environment so we can meet the needs of our resellers and end users that need these technology products to keep our economy and our country going, that we’re not putting anyone at risk.”

Here’s a summary of CRN’s interview with Schwab.

What are you hearing from partners?

They are very focused on helping their end-user customers accelerate their work-from-home plans. They are working with companies that did not have a fully developed and executed work-from-home or remote-worker plan, and for those who actually had one but maybe weren’t prepared to scale it and they’re having issues now that they’re actually deploying it.

What are you telling partners when they call you looking for products that may be in short supply?

“We are asking them to reach out immediately to us and highlight the end user and the circumstances so we can do our best to work with manufacturers from a prioritization standpoint. So, for instance, we had one of the top 10 school districts in the country that needed to buy thousands of devices. They called us on a Saturday. And we were able to get them delivered on Monday, half-way across the country. This was over 10,000 units.

Those students were not going to be able to work from home. They had not fully deployed their mobile capabilities. So my brother [Michael Schwab, D&H co-president] was directly involved in making sure we executed that.

It’s important that they communicate with us and we’ll do our best to prioritize and share availability. There’s a little bit of triage. Right now, demand is outstripping supply, so we’re doing everything possible to increase the supply and then get the products to the partners to help them meet their end-user needs.

What are you hearing from vendors?

They’re very focused on availability. We’ve seen increased demand in the categories that drive work-from-home capabilities, including the basic items such as notebooks, docking stations, mice, keyboards, displays, networking equipment. The basics of home connectivity. That’s the basics of what we’re hearing from vendors and customers.

What are you seeing out there in terms of product availability?

The availability [issue] really stems from the initial virus outbreak in China, which closed a lot of manufacturing, which disrupted the supply chain on PCs. That was the precursor. The acceleration of the issue was the pickup in demand due to the virus in the United States.

Every vendor is accelerating plans. Every vendor is being very nimble. I give great kudos to the vendor community for air shipping in products that usually would come on a boat. Reprioritizing and investing in getting supplies up and running as quickly as possible. It is all-hands-on-deck from the vendor community. I’ve seen incredible initiative and passion to help alleviate the challenges.

Are there vendors that are changing where they manufacture in the wake of this?

That’s really across the continuum. That started to accelerate when the tariffs went into place and there was a fear that more tariffs were potentially going to go into place. I think many manufacturers were shifting production and, if nothing else, they were hedging or having multiple options. I think the fact that many factories in China were closed for weeks, if not longer, created even more of a sense of urgency. That’s not an overnight dilemma, but I think what they’ve done is they pushed as much capacity as they could to other manufacturing locations.

Most D&H employees are working from home, but how are you managing the warehouse and the workers there?

The distribution part of our facilities are essential. They are still at work. Employees, if their kids are off school and they can’t come to work, we’re allowing them to not come in. Then what we’ve done to drive the utmost safety and security is we do multiple cleanings per day around the distribution centers. We are separating staff so there’s no overlap in our staff and we have thermometers, so if anyone isn’t feeling well, we send them home.

We’re really trying to make sure that we are creating an environment so we can meet the needs of our resellers and end users that need these technology products to keep our economy and our country going, that we’re not putting anyone at risk.