Global vision: Michael Flink named president of ADI Global New position created to drive growth, customer partnerships
By Martha Entwistle
Updated Wed December 3, 2014
MELVILLE, N.Y.—As president of ADI Global, Michael Flink plans to help the distribution company forge global supply agreements and help vendors reach more customers globally.
Flink, who has been with ADI since 2003 and most recently served as president of ADI North America, was named to the newly created role on Dec. 1.
“Each region [the Americas, EMEA, and India] had its best practices, but with separate leadership [and no global leader until now] we couldn't share best practices in a cohesive manner,” Flink told Security Systems News.
Similarly, it was difficult for ADI to quickly coordinate global supply agreements “without a global leader to lead and sign agreements,” Flink said.
ADI has more than 200 branch locations throughout the world, including a large multi-office operation in India.
ADI has teams in place in Europe and Asia Pacific, and those teams will now report to Flink. Rob Aarnes, who most recently served as VP of operations in North America has been promoted to president of ADI Americas. Flink will report to Honeywell Security Group president Ron Rothman. Honeywell owns ADI.
In addition to global supply agreements and best practices, Flink is charged with strengthening product categories and leading its geographic expansion.
Flink said ADI also wants to help vendors—particularly smaller vendors—to do business in different countries.
For example, Flink said that doing business in India can be very difficult because the country is made up of 20 states with different laws and tax regulations. Because ADI has a large staff and multiple offices in India, it can help vendors and integrators do business there, he said.
Asked about specific best practices, Flink said that India offers a “broader range of technical services—pre-sale, configuration and post-sale support,” and he is “interested in bringing some of those elements to North America.”
The North American operation is particularly adept at producing ADI's catalogs, Flink said. It produces four 800-page printed catalogs annually. And it prints 100,000 copies of each of those catalogs. These best practices will be shared with the other regions.
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