Welcome to the Supplierbank Blog!
It gives me great pleasure to introduce myself to my fellow suppliers on Supplierbank. I am Paul Smith, the Commercial Director of Supplierbank, the force behind our networking community for Public and Private Sector suppliers.
I have been working within the Public Sector for a number of years, mainly on large procurement and financial system projects, implementing changes to how the Public Sector communicate with the the people that supply their goods and services.
Supplierbank was born out of frustration. A large problem facing virtually all bodies in the Public Sector is the lack of realtime information on their suppliers. This becomes even more apparent when implementing Purchase to Pay systems (online ordering software) when the most significant key information of an email address to send purchase orders to is usually missing or not to hand for the team handling the supplier adoption.
Supplierbank was the brainchild of Grant Viklund, the Technical Director and I, of creating a simple portal to collect all the supplier information, load it into systems and then effective and efficiently communicate with our suppliers. With a great team supporting me, it has grown and expanded to accommodate other strategies the Public Sector works with. We now have over 10,000 companies, and organisations on or network.
We started small but with some key objectives behind the site:
- Make supplier communication easy for all involved
- Collect accurate information to make purchasing efficient and easy
- Build networks of suppliers
- Train and inform our community to up-skill them and help them win more business
- Make it easy for suppliers to be found by buyers and procurement professionals
- Inform the community of new opportunities, jobs and events
- Bring our UK supplier sector together
Over the past three years we have cultivated the site from its humble five pages of html to the fantastic large interactive portal we now share. We have formed relationships with strategic partners and begun the process of meeting our objectives of building a supplier network that meets the demands of challenging and changing time for the UK.
New buttons and a brand new look
Many of you may have noticed over the past few months subtle changes to the supplierbank portal. We have changed much of the site and made it more supplier focused. Over the summer we will be making some big announcements and I can start now by telling you what you can expect very soon;
- The ability to upgrade your Company Profile to make it stand out to the public sector buyers and the supplier community
- You will be able to post jobs and opportunities in the classified directory to a large market of suppliers and their staff
- Promote your events, sales launches, promotional days etc to your community
Not only do Companies have a profile on Supplierbank, so do their staff! Presently we have allowed the person creating the Company Profile to create a personal account. Very shortly you will be able to send out staff requests add additional people to your Company profile. We will let you know when it comes online.
Networking
Probably our biggest and most important objective was the ability to bring suppliers together and help build new relationships, share ideas and experiences and create “offline” communities. One of the most frequent comments back from our supplier community was “Can I talk to other suppliers?”
When a supplier creates a Company Profile you join a local network, we will shortly be adding simple touches that will allow you to find other suppliers in your network as well as running, breakfast, lunch and evening networking events close to you.
We will be looking for local representatives to help run and build the local communities. If you are interested in becoming a Network Associate, drop me an email to psmith@supplierbank.com.
We have also been asked if we could run networking events by industry and will be looking at that in the very near future.
Company of the Week
I want to promote your company and I want to share who you are with the rest of the community. The Supplierbank team will be posting each week an interview with a Company and making them front page. If you think your Company has what it takes to be on our front page, send me an email with your name and telephone number and I will call you back.
Look out for my posts and let me know what can we do to improve the site, if you have a news story and ideas that you want the world to know, then lets share them.
Kind Regards
Paul Smith
Commerical Director
Please feel free to let me know what you think