Page 73 - Impiantistica Novembre-Dicemvre 2015
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Have you ever been asked by a colle- healthy competition for bids, while being sure they
ague who are the manufacturers of have placed the right vendors in their vendor lists.
“gas treatment packages”? Which of These players usually have sophisticated in-house
them are good and which are their vendor management systems, which will necessa-
references? Maybe you were not rily stay in place, but an additional source of qua-
asked about “gas treatment packa- lified information could help them integrate these
ges” in particular, but the question applies to any systems.
supply of goods and services in the plant engine- On the other hand, Vendors are always looking to
ering industry. increase the global visibility of their products and
The answer to this question may not always be tri- services; being at the right table at the right time
vial. An extensive research on Google can always has become a huge challenge and cost. The abili-
help but the quality of the answer is not what your ty to engineer the right solution is what makes the
colleague is looking for: information that can be best vendor win a bid, however, in several occa-
trusted. sions the best vendor is not even aware of potential
SupplHi, a startup for the plant engineering indu- opportunities, just because it is not in the radar of
stry, offers a quick answer to these questions. The the Client.
idea was born from experiences in the Italian value In brief, the plant engineering world requires a sim-
chain, which has plenty of excellences and an im- ple system to know “who does what” and “how
pressive competence capital, but sometimes lacks good is each supplier”.
international visibility with end-users, especially in
the case of SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises). “Who does what”
The industry needs Today everybody “re-invents the wheel“, stretching
traditional approaches far above their efficiency li-
There are thousands of suppliers in the world, in mit, not benefitting from other players’ experiences.
traditional and emerging markets. The time availa- Sophisticated Buyers (contractors and end-users)
ble to place the orders keeps shortening and cost have their own vendor bases and often run ad-hoc
pressure is at its historical high. Buyers need to vendor scouting projects, especially when entering
keep their vendor base large enough to stimulate new geographies or new products. They indivi-
dually categorize “who does what” to support their
Vendors are always looking to increase procurement cycle and they do so by managing a
the global visibility of their products and large volume of information independently, at a tre-
mendous cost.
services; being at the right table Consequently, there is not a single standard ca-
at the right time has become a huge tegorization of goods and services, with buyers
classifying supplies independently and vendors
challenge and cost spending time and money to promote themselves
in each different categorization (figure 1).
The necessity for global commercial visibility re-
Fig. 1 – Examples of lack of
categorization standards
Impiantistica Italiana - Novembre-Dicembre 2015 71
