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The NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence, the research arm of the National Association of Wholesaler Distributors (NAW), announced its new research study, Optimizing Human Capital Development: A Distributor’s Guide to Building Sustainable Competitive Advantage Through Talent Strategy, the first research study and accompanying wall map to provide a pathway to achieve business excellence by maximizing a distributor’s human capital potential.

This comprehensive, evidence-based guidebook draws a large body of knowledge from extensive academic research and rich, practical experiences accumulated through collaborative distribution industry-based projects. It provides a success formula for human capital development by identifying all the key ingredients, ranging from talent strategy alignment, talent planning and talent acquisition, to talent management, talent development, talent retention and return-on-talent-investment. This research study provides not only a large number of best practices in each talent area, but also a plethora of practical tools for assessing, improving and evaluating a company’s current talent initiatives.

Included with this study is a separate, over-sized Human Capital Development Framework wall map to help distributors follow how human capital business processes are linked to enhance shareholder value.

Optimizing Human Capital Development includes:
 • 25 sets of best talent practices for distributors to use in their human capital development strategy
 • 16 action steps that distributors can implement immediately
 • 62 real-world distributor examples from across many lines of trade

This research study is the seventh one created through collaboration between the NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence and Texas A&M University’s Global Supply Chain Laboratory — two leaders in wholesale distribution education and training. These organizations joined forces in January 2009 to launch an alliance dedicated to furthering the understanding and application of best practices in wholesale distribution. Through this alliance, the Council for Research on Distributor Best Practices (CRDBP) was created. The mission of the CRDBP is to create competitive advantage for wholesaler distributors through development of new industry research, educational programs, and publications to deliver that research and knowledge to industry executives and their management teams.