Rob Rodin is the chairman and CEO of RDN Group; strategic advisors focused on corporate transitions, customer interface, sales and marketing, distribution, and supply chain management. (Customers include GM, GE, US Navy, Siemens, and Simon and Schuster). In addition to his board role at CommerceNet, Rodin also serves on the company's Executive committee.
For over 10 years, Mr. Rodin served as CEO and president of Marshall Industries a global, industrial, electronics distributor and supply chain management company with over $2 billion in sales. The company managed more than 2,500 employees, 500 suppliers, 300,000 part numbers, and 77,000 customers in 36 countries. Customers and suppliers included Intel, General Electric, AT+T, Motorola, IBM, Toshiba, and Siemens. Quality and customer demands required compliance with many disciplines, including Six Sigma, ISO 900X, Malcolm Baldridge, Total Quality Management, and Deming's Total Quality System.
At Marshall Industries, Mr. Rodin engineered the company's reinvention, turning a conventionally successful $500 million distributor into a Web-enabled $2 billion global competitor. He lead the enterprise design, resulting in a complete transformation of the company's organizational structure and entire IT platform (and interface modules), as well as the complete development and implementation of the following systems: enterprise resource planning, materials requirement planning, forecast and demand planning, customer relationship management, supplier relationship management, employee relationship management, and an automated storage retrieval warehouse. All of these solutions were required to interface seamlessly with the company's global customer base and Marshall's joint venture partners.
Additionally, Mr. Rodin created Marshall's website, recognized two years in a row as the "World's Number One Business-to-Business Website" by Advertising Age Magazine. Moreover, Information Week Magazine highlighted Marshall Industries as the "World's Number One Company in the Use of Technology;" CIO Magazine recognized Mr. Rodin as one of the "Top 100 Leaders for the New Millennium;" UCLA presented him with the "Information Systems Award for System Leadership;" and the University of Connecticut presented Mr. Rodin with the "Distinguished Alumni Award" and elected him to the "University Hall of Fame."
Mr. Rodin's best selling book, Free, Perfect and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands, chronicles the radical transformation of Marshall Industries. The changes he led have been case studies examined at Harvard Business School, Columbia University, USC, MIT, and Stanford University. The transformation was also covered by CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and Fortune Magazine, and reviewed in several books, including The New Economic by W. Edwards Deming and Customer Intimacy by Fred Wiersema.
After the sale of Marshall Industries to Avnet Inc., Mr. Rodin lead the spinout of several new start up companies, raising $94 million and bringing to market many of the company's IT and Internet properties. These companies now provide extended supply chain management tools for the electronic industry.
Mr. Rodin's numerous board of directors activities include:
• CommerceNet—vice chairman
• Napster (formally Roxio)—compensation committee chairman and audit committee member
• SupplyFrame—board member
• SM&A—board member and governance and nominating committee member
• Cyber Coders—board member
• University of Southern California Marshall School of Business—board of leaders
• The ALS Therapy Development Institute—board member and compensation committee chairman
• Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment Commission—advisory board member
Mr. Rodin formerly served on the board of directors at Inter-Tel and RosettaNet, the planning committee for the Harvard and Stanford president seminars (YPO), the Advisory Board of Distribution at the University of Southern California, the board of advisors at the University of Connecticut School of Business (Executive Council and Strategic Development committee), and the advisory board at Electronics Supply & Manufacturing magazine (CMP Publications). He also served as a trustee of the W. Edwards Deming Institute and the president of the National Electronic Distribution Association's (NEDA) education foundation.
