Source Atlantic Stays Ahead of the Digital Curve

• Matt Hanlon has been innovating at Canadian-based industrial distributor Source Atlantic since he was in college. Among his many accomplishments: leading the company’s e-commerce initiative in 2019 before the pandemic hit.

• As the applied innovation and technology manager for St. John, New Brunswick-based Source Atlantic, Hanlon serves as the company’s chief innovator.

• Hanlon is leading Source Atlantic on analytics, cloud, process automation, augmented and mixed reality, the internet of things, artificial intelligence and more.

• He is focused on helping not only his company innovate but also Source Atlantic’s customers.

Matt Hanlon has spent his entire 14-year career working for Source Atlantic, where he serves as applied innovation and technology manager for the St. John, New Brunswick-based industrial and MRO distributor.

Hanlon, whose first two years with Source Atlantic were as a summer student (the Canadian equivalent of an intern), made it his mission from the beginning to bring innovation — or “digital evolution,” as he calls it — to the company.

He has been charged with creating a long-term digital strategy for Source Atlantic that includes everything from analytics to cloud to process automation to augmented and mixed reality to the internet of things to artificial intelligence.

All that he has accomplished, or is working toward, to make Source Atlantic a leader in digital capabilities make him a worthy winner of MDM’s 2021 Digital Innovator award. But it was perhaps the timing of his push for e-commerce in 2019 that helped Hanlon rise above the competition.

Under Hanlon’s direction, the company was able to enter COVID-19 with a robust digital strategy, providing customers an omnichannel experience that kept sales flowing and operations moving.

“I’m happy about when we started our e-commerce digital journey,” Hanlon says. “Had we started a year later, we would still have been in the design and beta phase. We were able to launch our e-commerce in 2019, which allowed us to have a digital-first approach for 2020. Having a lean team and some automation tools in the back end allowed us to ramp up our catalog offering very, very quickly and it allowed us to onboard customers. Had we started even six months later than when we did, I think we would not have been in as good a position with our digital offering.”

One advantage Hanlon has had at Source Atlantic is a C-suite that has been receptive to new ideas. As a summer student, he even presented to the leadership team evidence that moving to wireless, handheld, Bluetooth connectivity would benefit the company. The executives listened and adopted his idea.

“Ever since then, it’s always been about, ‘What technology do we need to help the company?’” Hanlon says. “We’ve always been encouraged to bring these ideas forward and that’s been the evolution of my career here.”

A way to differentiate

Hanlon says he sees digital as a way for distributors to differentiate, especially in the eyes of their customers who need a value-added supply chain partner.

“They don’t traditionally see industrial suppliers as people who can help them with integrations of their systems or be able to bring mixed reality to them or think about analytics, but we’re doing that for ourselves and bringing it to them,” Hanlon says. “I think that’s the biggest challenge for our industry. We know that the digital journey for everybody is a little different, but we feel as if we can help customers in their journey.”

Hanlon’s journey isn’t complete, of course. His goal now is to keep innovating for Source Atlantic and the entire distribution space, which he fully understands is often seen as a laggard compared with other industries.

“I’m trying to have a better understanding of the needs of the industry and the company, and a better understanding of what technology exists, and marrying those up for new solutions,” he says. “Our biggest component is taking that IT, that traditional backend infrastructure, turning it around and making it externally available, meaning that as we innovate internally, we can bring new solutions to the market.”