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.

Recently, I introduced a prime contractor to our CONNEX Marketplace solution and discussed how their buyers could use it to find the exact qualified suppliers they were looking for.  We ended up piloting a program with them which proved to be extremely effective in finding specific suppliers and I’d like to share more about it with you today.

During our initial discussions with the Prime company, they mentioned a very challenging request where they needed to find a supplier that met very specific requirements.  The supplier needed to be a machine shop that could do the work, meet certain requirements and perform some additional work afterwards such as additive work, welding etc.  As you can imagine, since it was a prime organization there were many requirements, including half a dozen different certifications, that needed to be met by the shop and it was a fairly challenging issue for the prime to find a supplier that met all of them.

After they had been working on the problem for a while, they asked us if we could leverage the benefits of the CONNEX Marketplace platform to help them.  Of course, we agreed and set up a program where we were able to run an event associated with that request that would help them find exactly who they were looking for.  We sat down with the buyers from the prime organization, gathered all of their requirements and found out that they wanted to interview sixteen qualified suppliers.  They also said they only had an hour a week to accomplish this and therefore wanted to do two half-hour interviews per week for 8 weeks

We went to work for the customer and leveraged the value of the CONNEX Marketplace. First off, we notified suppliers within the database about the needs of the prime contractor and had them respond directly to the request in the CONNEX Marketplace exchange center where suppliers can respond to manufacturers needs. After that, we leveraged our partner network by reaching out to partners across the country and asking them to help us identify qualified suppliers.

The results to our efforts were amazing. Using the CONNEX Marketplace platform we lined up qualified supplier after qualified supplier, week after week.  We brought them 16 qualified suppliers to interview over the course of 8 weeks and it was an amazing success. In fact, the buyers for the prime company said that they never wanted to look for suppliers in any other way again. It was exactly what the prime was hoping for. They said that they and their small business liaison officer had participated in many industry events and outreach programs trying to find different kinds of suppliers but they never had experienced that much success so quickly and so targeted to their specific needs.

As you can imagine, using the CONNEX Marketplace platform saved them an immense amount of time and was an extremely effective way for them to find the exact supplier they were looking for.

For more information about CONNEX Marketplace, or to find out about how you can hold a CONNEXION event to help you find the exact kind of qualified suppliers you’re looking for, please visit: www.CONNEXMarketplace.com