Acuity Endorses NEMRA POS Standards

Acuity Brands has joined 41 manufacturers/brands and leading electrical distributors to endorse the NEMRA POS Minimum Reporting Standards.

The standards, developed by a joint manufacturer rep/manufacturer task force, identify the minimum point of sale/point of transfer information that manufacturers need from distributors to accurately compensate their local sales agent. Repositioned as “place of sale,” this information is needed for identifying where product is sold and does not include customer information. The decision to share customer level information is left to commercial discussions between distributors and manufacturers, and can be accommodated within the standards reporting format.

John Mabbott, senior vice president, C&I Sales, Acuity Brands Lighting, said in the press release, “Just like lighting has changed, distribution is changing and many of our strategic accounts have changed their lighting sales models. Point-of-sale reporting is important to our distributors to ensure that the appropriate lighting agent gets compensated and it is very important to our agents. While we’re not a member of NEMRA, we applaud NEMRA for taking a leadership position on this issue to support independent sales agents and for reaching out to involve all manufacturers in this important initiative.”

As an endorser Acuity Brands encourages distributors to submit POS information to them in the approved NEMRA POS/POT format. Ken Hooper, president of NEMRA, said in the release, “NEMRA knows that accurate POS/POT reporting is important to all manufacturers and sales organizations as it addresses the issue of appropriate compensation and sales reporting.  We also know that all distributors want local salespeople to be compensated for their efforts. For these reasons we’ve reached out to manufacturers such as Acuity that sell through lighting agents and others who have direct sales forces.  We thank Acuity Brands for supporting this initiative.”

Click here for more information on NEMRA’s POS initiative, to read the research and see which manufacturers and distributors have endorsed and adopted the standards.