Carlton-Bates Company is a large distributor of industrial electronic and electrical products to its primary customer base of manufacturers. Prior to his position at Carlton-Bates Company, he held sales and sales management positions at the field, divisional and corporate level in the computer industry Upon joining Carlton-Bates Company in 1990, he soon began restructuring the sales organization to ensure that all sales personnel were truly focused on determining and meeting the needs of the company's customers. This restructuring was designed to get the sales organization focused on learning more about each customer and then adding value to the sales proposition for each customer. The restructuring further focused on reducing the customer's cost of operation wherever possible and installing a structured sales system that ensured the proper sales activities were being implemented.

The structured system had built-in accountability for every level of field sales and sales management. He developed a sales training seminar for all sales and sales managers that is built around the sales system that was put in place. He was instrumental in developing an internal management-training program called Professional Management Development (PMD). The purpose of PMD is to train and prepare prospective management personnel to become a part of the future management team. Mr. Bonds has a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the University of Texas . He has been married for 35 years and has a son and daughter. He has been active in church as a deacon, director and Sunday school teacher for over 25 years. His hobbies include golf, hunting, fishing and traveling with his wife.

Mr. Worthy develops and coordinates all aspects of Continuous improvement for his division. Tripp has extensive manufacturing experience in several industries including Textiles, Food & Beverage, Consumer Goods and Forest Products. While with International Paper, Tripp has served as the lead Organization Development consultant for several major start-ups and redesigns in both manufacturing and service related organizations. Tripp received his Bachelor of Science and Masters degrees from Auburn University.

He has over 35 years experience Human Resources, training, compensation, safety and manufacturing working with Eaton Corporation, Milliken and Company and West Point/Stevens. Has put in programs on 5S, Lean Manufacturing, sales training, Continuous Improvement, compensation reward systems and others. Married to Barbara Stanley, has successfully raised three children and has lived to tell about it.

Jay Muscatello graduated from Virginia Tech in 1980 with a degree in Electrical Engineering. While attending Virginia Tech he worked part time as a technician in Poly-Scientific's Quality Department, and assumed a full time position as a QC Engineer upon graduation. After working in quality and as a Production Manager at Poly-Sci's electronic facility, Jay left to join FiberCom; a small Fiber Optic start up in 1985. After building FiberCom's manufacturing group to support the $30M dollar business it had become, Litton purchased FiberCom and Jay found himself once more under the Poly-Sci umbrella. In 2000 he moved from his position at FiberCom back to Poly-Scientific to head the manufacturing department. Jay is married with four children, two of which are now following in dad's footsteps at Virginia Tech.

For the past three years, Wendell has led the Demand Flow and Lean initiatives at Poly-Scientific. During this time Poly-Scientific has achieved significant gains in productivity, eliminated process wastes, and realized numerous cost savings projects. Additionally, during the past year , Wendell has served as a production coach responsible for the daily operation and direction of a 13 member work team. His focus has been to revitalize the DFT and Lean concepts. Prior to this position, Wendell served for six years as a TQM/TEAM Facilitator where he trained and developed twenty-nine production work teams in the basic concepts of teamwork, customer / supplier relationships, conflict management and process improvement. Wendell hold's a degree from Radford University in Industrial Training and Communications.

Since 1987, Joe Ellers has been very active with businesses that utilize Distribution to take their products to market. In his capacity as a consultant, Joe has worked with over 50 manufacturers, 30 distributors and 20 reps to help them improve their sales and profits. He is a frequent contributor to publications such as NEDA News, Electronic Distribution Today, Industrial Distribution and The PT Distributor. He is a regular presenter at NEDA and ERA events as well as UAB's Industrial Distribution program and the American Supply Association's program. In addition, Joe currently has an ownership interest in a distributor and a rep firm. His business, Palmetto Associates, is located in Clemson , South Carolina but he has worked with over 600 customers world-wide. Joe received a Doctorate of Humane Letters from the Technical University in the Country of Georgia and in 1996 he was elected as an Academician for the Academy of Quality in Moscow, Russia.

Vic Dyer is a human resources consultant with over thirty years human resources and operations experience with public companies. He is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma with post graduate work in industrial relations from Loyola University of Chicago . After a six year career as a high school teacher and athletic coach he joined Montgomery Ward as a retail store human resources manager in 1964. He served in a variety of positions at retail store and district level and spent 13 years at the corporate level where he was Field Personnel Director and Director of Management Development. As Director of Management Development he was responsible for installing the career development system of the parent company (Mobil Oil) in Wards. In 1984 he joined Pennsylvania House Furniture, a subsidiary of General Mills as Vice President of Human Resources. In 1989 Pennsylvania House was sold to LADD Furniture Company and Vic was appointed Vice President of Human Resources for LADD in January of 1990. He served in that role until his retirement in 2000 and subsequently has been involved in human resources consulting.

Paul Clipp, founder and director of The Southern Associates consulting group in Clemson, SC, helps organizations through change. Paul has worked with some of the best organizations improving leadership, management, teams, costs, set-up, quality, inventory use and much more. Paul is an industrial engineer (BIE, General Motors Institute ‘72) with an MBA (Harvard Business School ‘75). He has published many articles on topics as diverse as strategic continuous improvement, improving quality, improving processes, performance appraisal, negotiating skills, resolving conflicts and implementing teams. He is the author of a published course on Implementing Total Quality Managment and co-author with Joseph C. Ellers of a course on Implementing Process Improvement and another on Market Driven Manufacturing.

Paul has been director of TSA since 1980 and is a frequent speaker to associations and at university sponsored seminars and conferences. His work is practical - working with the group to solve difficult problems while finding and exploiting new opportunities.