Increasing supplier diversity is something businesses often want to do, but sometimes find difficult to achieve.
Entrepreneur Rod Robinson found that out during his time as chief procurement officer for Cincinnati Bell. He also worked to solve that same problem working with large corporations, when he founded
Accel Advisors, a procurement and supplier diversity consultant firm, in 2005.
Today, Robinson, along with diet fitness website founder Chris Downie, has now turned to the web to more efficiently link professional minority and women-owned suppliers to the companies looking for their services and products.
Robinson and Downie, founder of the popular
Sparkpeople, have recently launched
connXus.com, which aims to link corporate buyers and diverse suppliers quickly and affordably.
"The reason connXus exists is because there really isn't anything out there like this. Rod spent years cultivating strategic resources and procurement programs for Fortune 500 companies, and many records out there are incomplete and fragmented. It's really hard to find good resources," said Sandi Straetker, a spokeswoman for the company.
ConnXus is working to bridge that gap. The site, which launched in December, has posted more than $10 million in bid opportunities. The company estimates they'll post 100 to 150 supplier opportunities, worth $40 to $60 million, by year's end.
The site is designed to offer a wide variety of opportunities for small, medium and large service and product suppliers, Straetker said. Companies join the site as buyer members, and pay a $19.95 a month membership fee. ConnXus is currently offering a 60 day fee-free trial offer for new members.
Minority-owned and women-owned businesses can create a free profile. There are more than 100 service and product categories available from legal, accounting and other professional services to transportation and manufacturing.
To help assure supplier quality, customers can add performance ratings to a supplier's profile through the site's propriety rating system. The better the supplier's rating, the higher it will rank in a corporate buyer's search. ConnXus recently was awarded a $40,000 CincyTech Imagining Grant to help it develop the technology.
"With connXus.com, companies can easily integrate supplier diversity into their normal sourcing process, reduce costs and increase quality," Robinson said in a release announcing the site.
Source: Sandi Straetker, PRiority Public Relations LLC
Writer: Feoshia Henderson
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This story originally appeared in Soapbox.