6 ms·
One-to-many supplier registration. We manufacture ductwork products for heavy industry (sugar mills, power generation). Each company has its own supplier regi
by gargarplex 11y ago
One-to-many supplier registration.
We manufacture ductwork products for heavy industry (sugar mills, power generation). Each company has its own supplier registration process for procurement, usually it involves entering our company's basic financial info, customer and project references list, etc. into some kind of custom Java web application.
There should be just one place that asks us to enter our DUNS number, our tax id, upload our W8BEN form, our ISO certificate, our company contacts, our references, our company financials, etc. and then mass-submit to all supplier registration forms within the industries we want to target.
This is a really simple business problem with a clear technical solution. Honestly you could just solve it by:
- WuFoo form to collect the company's information
- Excel spreadsheet to list the vendor registration portal URLs for each company, with different industries in different tabs
- Human labor to go through and find the data from WuFoo and plug it into each supplier registration webapp.
You could make money on a pay-per-registration model. All that would be required would be a simple portal for users to see the progress of each supplier registration application. It's basically CRUD.
Maybe some ambitious company would try to innovate by building the One supplier portal to rule them all, but for now, this is an opportunity for a quick win & a business that could be run for cash.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- roneesh 11y agoI'll second this, before becoming a programmer I was a mechanical engineer in piping, we have tons of inefficiencies like this still. Partly it's that the people who run these industries are comfortable to keep using fax and e-mail, but another issue is that companies often don't have access to good technical knowledge to pick the right tool or develop better ones. Huge opportunity here.
- ZoFreX 11y agoI've looked into this issue specifically for piping, as it happens. From my perspective one of the issues with 'solving' this is basically: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ At the place I worked we had 3 different supplier databases, each one having been introduced to replace the last, which was never fully phased out.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- roneesh 11y agoDefinitely an issue! We try half baked things and they just stick around. On the other end of the spectrum, once something works, it's kept around forever. It's interesting, this industry seems ripe for disruption, but it hasn't happened yet. I think maybe because we think any tool will do, when in reality we need a 10X tool like any other industry. Also, your customers are people who are far less computer savvy than other groups, so UI/UX issues are paramount.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mrfusion 11y agoSounds interesting. I'm not seeing who the customer would be? How would you charge for it? (Feel free to email me if you want to discuss offline in more detail)
- gargarplex 11y agoThe customer is a company, Acme, that manufactures a "widget" for power plants. Imagine there's another company, let's call it Texas State Power Construction (TSPC), that needs a new widget to replace the old one in the plant. The engineer at the TSPC plant sends a request to the procurement manager asking for a new widget. The procurement manager then searches his or her (more often her) Supplier database for registered companies that make widgets. Procurement manager doesn't contact Acme because Acme never registered with TSPC. Acme loses out on this business opportunity. Suppliers get in the db by registering on the enterprise-y, most likely Java, "Supplier Registration" portal linked to on the website. Registration is a pain in the neck mostly because it's boring and nobody wants to do it. I would love to do it for every power company in the USA, but it's boring. I guess I could try to hire an employee to do it for me at $15 an hour but I would rather just pay for results. (My company is an "Acme". We make a "widget". We would LOVE to be in the database of every "TSPC" and get more sales inquiries. I spend $500/month on adwords and get maybe 2 leads, and they're of dubious quality. $250/lead sound too high? The last trade show I went to cost $1600 in expenses alone and I generated only two good leads. That's $800/lead.)
- helen842000 11y agoI have experience of doing that but for the water engineering industry. I'd assume there was some similarities in the processes. Would you be interested in a trial to see what value this generates for you?
- amourgh 11y agoIsn't this what Alibaba do?How different are they?
- perplexes 11y agohttps://vendorform.com/ https://vendorform.com/ is trying to do this for the college store industry
- mdolon 11y agoHow easy/hard would it be to sell this service to companies like yours? Would love to chat more about it offline (mdolon at gmail)
- omouse 11y agoThat's the important question for B2B companies, how long is the sales effort to close a deal on something like this? How will anyone discover this and buy it?
- gargarplex 11y agoI can authorize $400/month for such a service today and could easily sign a letter of intent if the prices were reasonable and you only billed me after successful registrations (after initial registration is fine too; sometimes they request additional information). @mdolon I sent an email with some of my thoughts mapped out in greater detail. Thanks for asking.
- henrythe9th 11y ago@gargarplex. I'd also love to learn more about this problem. My partner has worked extensively in securing deals with Fortune 500 companies previously. Shoot me an email henrythe9th at gmail. Thanks.
- curiously 11y agoAre you looking for a way to automate the registration process on the web? Not sure if that's what you are looking for, if so I have a product that can be customized to do exactly that, can you send me a quick email in my profile?
- gargarplex 11y agoReally glad you commented. Sent you an email; looking forward to connecting.