by Alan Davis | Sept 14, 2021

Hello, this is Alan Davis, President and CEO of I5 services.  Our company has created the CONNEX Marketplace, a vibrant database platform which connects U.S. manufacturers and their capabilities. In this article, I will discuss the challenge of manufacturers finding qualified suppliers to meet their supply chain needs.

As you know, manufacturers work with many suppliers that each complete necessary steps in the manufacturing process.  Some suppliers provide raw materials while others may pre-fabricate parts for final assembly.  Whichever goods or services the suppliers provide, it is critical that manufacturers can quickly find the qualified supplier they need to complete the job.

Unfortunately, current solutions do not easily solve this problem and many manufacturers find themselves spending enormous amounts to time and money trying to find the exact supplier they need. This is especially the case now as manufacturers are scrambling to find new suppliers due to overseas shortages and problems with  current supply chains. The good news is that CONNEX Marketplace has been designed to do exactly that and solve this manufacturing headache.

When we first set out to develop the CONENX Marketplace platform many years ago, our top priority was to create a solution that was developed closely with manufacturers input. To do this we sat down with many large, medium, and small size manufacturers and asked them why the current solutions weren’t solving this problem and what frustrations it was leading to.

Of all the responses we received, one of them really stood out to me.  The manufacturer simply said, “Try this. Try searching the internet or other platforms for all the woman-owned, small-business, plastic injection molding companies in the state and tell me if you can come up with results that are actually useful to you. You can’t do it.  The tool to do this doesn’t exist.”

His response perfectly drove home the point to me of why we needed to build CONNEX Marketplace.  At that moment, I completely understood that I couldn’t simply use Google search, other industry platforms or even government solutions to run that kind of detailed search.

With development of CONNEX Marketplace, we are now providing a solution to this manufacturing challenge. CONNEX allows manufacturers to diversify their supply chain and find a supplier that meets the exact capabilities they are looking for.  Manufacturers can easily narrow their search results based on criteria such as certifications, SBA designations, processes, equipment and many more specifications.  With our unique datasets, CONNEX Marketplace allows manufacturers to get in and quickly find suppliers with exact capabilities the manufacturer needs to diversify their supply chain.

CONNEX Marketplace platform truly is an amazing resource for manufacturers to find and sort through accurate supplier data and we invite you to give it a try.

For more information, please visit www.ConnexMarketplace.com