If you sell to the government (directly or through a GSA), work with contractors who sell to the government or are providing materials for any ARRA (American Recovery & Reinvestment Act … stimulus funds) you may have been asked to provide country of origin information for the products you have provided. A component of the ARRA is a “buy American” provision which relates to where the product is manufactured (and there can be multiple definitions and there is a clause stating the requirement does not override existing U.S. trade treaties). Needless to say, it can get confusing.
What can be more frustrating for distributors is having to source information from manufacturers, and sometimes multiple times for different customers / opportunities.
Given that manufacturers should have this information, appending the information to existing product databases sounds like what distributors need.
It appears that Trade Service recognized an opportunity to help its distributors (presumably they heard of the problem from their customers). According to Trade Service’s current newsletter, beginning next month they will be adding Country of Origin Labeling (COOL information to their product data for manufacturers who supply the information. Hopefully this will help make it easier for distributors to service government funded business (one of the few growth markets) either directly, through GSA Schedules, or through their distributors.
Speaking of helping distributors, while on their website we noticed that TSC has recently developed connections (don’t know if it is embedded, integrated, electronically connected) its Supplier Xchange system with two more estimating software systems over the past 30 days (ConEst and Cert-In). This now makes 5 contractor estimating systems that have connectivity to Supplier Xchange. If it is something that is gaining traction with contractors, must be a reason (and perhaps something distributors should look into).
In today’s market, you need every advantage to take share. With the government the “spender of last resort”, should you be calling on government entities? Consider it earning back your tax dollars!
2 Comments
We are very excited about Supplier Xchange and the level of adoption that we have seen since its launch in January. We’ve worked very hard with distributors, contractors and the various estimating software vendors to ensure that the service meets the demands and expectations from all sides of the market. While there is more to do, we will continue to work hard to help our contractor and distributor customers communicate at increasingly higher levels in today’s difficult economic environment.
Tod Moore
VP
Trade Service
The “direct connect” feature for Supplier Exchange really works well for us. We have are now working to get all of our viable contractors connected.
As we expand our foot print, we expect to aggressively use Supplier Exchanges’ connectivity in our marketing.
NE Distributor.
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