Your Relevant Solution

Finding answers and delivering results is what Relevant Industrial is all about. As an industrial business in a competitive market, Relevant Industrial has learned to adapt in order to grow. Jeremy Wilcox, VP of Business Development for Fluid Connectors at Relevant Industrial, sits down with host Tyler Kern to discuss Relevant Industrial’s key differentiators in the market.

PF&G, otherwise known as Precision Fitting and Gauge, came together with Relevant about two years ago. This “precision fit” helped boost company output and expertise while Wilcox expanded on staff skills, “My role…is really to manage the overall health of our division. We have remarkable talent within our sales team.”

Not only does the team help educate customers on services and products which Relevant offers but, Wilcox said, “We really want to understand what those needs and pain points are with our customers.” Through the management of four Parker Stores, in addition to four hose manufacturing facilities across the company, Relevant Industrial helps meet the needs of clients in a new way.

“Really, it helps the guys who need something quick and fast,” explained Wilcox. With an in-person experience, the customer can walk in and grab what they need or have a hydraulic hose component made for them, “We’ll be able to build them right there on location and help them immediately,” noted Wilcox.

Building a strong and positive relationship with vendors is also key to Relevant’s mission, “The relationship with our vendors obviously is every bit of important as our customers,” said Wilcox.

“Really what fluid connectors group is, you know, it’s a very vast portfolio of products,” noted Wilcox, “All the way from, you know, our hydraulic components which is hydraulic hose, adaptors, valves…to big industrial large bore hoses.” These components are used by a variety of different industries, including transportation and food and beverage.

But one of the actions that really sets Relevant Industrial apart from traditional distribution is also being an alternative fuels distributor for MRO products, like CMG (compressed natural gas).

To meet the needs of the industrial automation and manufacturing industry, Relevant Industrial supplies best-in-class parts, pieces, services, and solutions. Dave Baxter, Vice President of Business Development, Engineered Solutions at Relevant Industrial, spoke with Tyler Kern about Relevant’s EPG solutions and capabilities.

For Baxter, it all boils down to flexibility. Relevant wants to provide a total solution for a customer and the best overall solution. “From our engineering practice perspective, we can utilize different technologies that we wouldn’t normally have contractual distribution requirements to sell and bring those technologies in,” Baxter said.

All the various industries Relevant works with day in and day out give their engineering teams the exposure and experience to solve any challenge. “Having exposure to all these different industries allows a group like Relevant Industrial, who has these experiences, to leverage different kinds of things that you would think would never fit in another industrial marketplace, but you can leverage that to create a brand-new solution that nobody’s ever even thought about,” Baxter said. “It forces us to get outside of the box.”

Relevant’s deep background in distribution paid off when the pandemic hit, and supply shortages became the norm across all industries. “We were able to go in and look at what are the things that our customers specifically need, and we increased our inventory in a great way,” Baxter said. “We brought in a lot of things that our customers had needed over the last couple of years when supply chains really tightened up.”

An example of Relevant in action is a customer who wanted to build a sizeable bio-gas plant two years ago. While the plant’s location was Minnesota, the engineering occurred in many places. This large dairy plant needed to solve its manure issue. Baxter said Relevant worked through engineering solutions to help automate processes to utilize the fuel capabilities of the generated manure.