Annual Report 2023

Our people are our greatest assets. The more we understand ourselves and each other, the better we can perform.

To develop a high-performance, purpose-led culture, our people need clear expectations and connection to our purpose and strategy, the capabilities to execute and the motivation to deliver. Underpinning this are our inspiring leaders who provide the direction, coaching and
support, as well as creating a safe and inclusive environment, where our people can perform at their best. This year, 87% of our desk-based global workforce completed inclusion training to help us understand our different teams, cultures and perspectives better.

We successfully piloted a new programme, Remarkable Women, to enable female leaders to transform their mindset encouraging bold and daring action. Our most senior leaders have been through an in-depth process to gain personal leadership insight, to inform their
development journey and future investment in leadership.

A technology-enabled experience powered by a human touch and specialist knowledge.

Our digital-led offer means that we are easy to do business with. Our fast and responsive model aims to deliver a seamless end-to-end customer experience through digital channels, human touch or a combination of both with specialist support and product knowledge. In combination with our solutions offer we are working towards delivering a frictionless, seamless and intuitive flow through our digital and offline channels. We are focusing on providing a more personalised and bespoke customer service for higher-value customers as we optimise our cost to serve.

A broad and deep range of industrial and MRO products to meet our customers' needs.

We offer a broad and deep product range including many specialist and technical items. Our strong and extensive supplier relationships ensure wide product choice, availability and substitute options. Our range expansion plans continue to form a core part of our growth
strategy. We are building out our product offer using data and insight as we become a product category specialist. In doing so, we are meeting the needs of our industrial customer base while ensuring we have the availability to be the single source provider of choice. Our own brand, RS PRO, is a key differentiator for us, offering customers high quality, competitively priced products.

A portfolio of solutions to solve our customers' problems and
create value.

We provide product and service solutions to make our customers' lives easier. We are solving our customers' problems across the design, build and maintain lifecycle which drives closer and stronger relationships, recurring revenue and greater customer lifetime value.

We are developing our service solutions offer within the areas of:

• Design: which support design engineers to develop product applications and pre-build prototypes
• Inventory: that help our customers improve product availability, reduce waste and inventory-carrying costs
• Procurement: that improve visibility for our customers and reduce purchase-to-pay costs.
• Maintenance: that ensure customers optimise their asset reliability, reduce downtime and energy costs and ensure compliance

We are developing our operating model to be sustainable and scalable to support our growth.

We have many initiatives focused on delivering operational excellence.

Following the commissioning of our DC expansion in Bad Hersfeld, Germany, in 2021/22, our focus during the year has been on improving efficiencies and scaling operations. In Asia Pacific, we have approved investment to upgrade our network of DCs in the region to reduce our costs to serve and improve customer service levels.

We continue to utilise our Global Shared Business Services (GSBS) based in our four Cos which now serve more than 25 countries in 30 languages. Through our Cos we are minimising transactional costs by standardising and streamlining our end-to-end processes with robotic process automation and other system solutions.

Our continuous improvement approach and engaged workforce have helped us deliver efficiency cost and time savings in the year. We are increasing the use of automation and data analytics to provide best-in-class service to our customers.