The Thomas Blog

What Is A Supplier Diversity Certification And What Are The Business Benefits

Implementing a supplier diversity program has evolved into a must-have in many U.S. companies. More stakeholders and policy makers are increasingly seeking out minority-owned, disadvantaged and small businesses. Companies that have long-standing relationships with reliable suppliers are seeing the benefits of diversity programs — and it’s making a significant impact in supply chain.

How Big Companies Choose New Suppliers

Are you looking to land one of the big customer? Becoming an approved supplier for a large global company can change your business forever. But landing a big customer takes far more than a hello and a handshake. We recently reviewed the supplier discovery process of a leading Fortune 500 company, and here’s what we learned:

Thomas Introduces Thomasnet.com Registered And Verified Programs Plus Supplier Badging

Thomas has been dedicated to helping industrial buyers and suppliers to connect with each other for over 120 years. As technologies have evolved and best practices in marketing and sales have changed, we’ve grown our toolsets to help make sure that industrial distributors and manufacturers have access to solutions that drive new business. To help support manufacturers who are searching for qualified buyers in targeted industries, Thomas has created Registered and Verified Thomasnet.com Programs. 

Industrial Buyers Are On The Thomas Network

You know exactly who your target customers are. 

You know what you can do for them and why they should choose you over your competition.

As for when you'd like them to contact you? ASAP would be nice. 

The only problem is, you don't know where they all are. 

The good news is that we do — they're part of the Thomas Network on Thomasnet.com.

Does The Thomas Network Really Work?

If you are thinking about listing your business on Thomasnet.com, you may have thought "Does Thomasnet.com really work?"

Of course, we understand that you may still have questions about the results that Thomasnet.com delivers to manufacturers and industrial companies like yours. That's understandable.

The Thomas Network connects active B2B buyers and engineers with 500K+ North American suppliers. If you tried to replicate all of the supplier evaluation activity on the platform that happens in a single month, it would take you 7.5 years — without sleeping. In fact, every 2 seconds, a supplier is evaluated by a buyer on the platform.

How To Find Veteran-Owned Suppliers on Thomasnet.com

Whether you're in need of new blood in your supply chain or trying to build up your list of diversity suppliers, Thomas can help save you time and hassle in sourcing exactly what you need. Thomasnet.com offers detailed information on North American companies in over 70,000 categories of products and services, not to mention our CAD file library, whitepapers, and guides. In this article we're here to show you how to make the most of Thomasnet.com's features by covering the basics of finding and sourcing from the 6,300+ veteran-owned companies on our platform.

12 Sourcing Tips To Identify New Quality Suppliers

When most buyers plan on identifying a new supplier, they are usually tempted to focus on the best price. However, concentrating only on low costs can hurt you in the long term. That's because shaving a few cents off the price of a product is no help if the quality is below standard and the component or material does not arrive when you need it.

So instead of solely focusing on cost, focus on quality by incorporating these 12 tips into your sourcing strategy:

Product Sourcing Trends For Q1 2019, As Told By Game Of Thrones

Winter is here (seriously, spring, where are you?), and the first quarter of 2019 is officially over. 

As an industrial company, you are always looking for ways to connect with B2B buyers. But what are those buyers looking for? With less than one week before the final season of Game Of Thrones premieres, we took a look at sourcing activity of some of the most useful elements of Westeros and beyond the wall on the Thomas Network at the end of Q1 to help you answer that question (and possibly win the Game of Thrones).

How Thomas WebTrax Differs From Google Analytics, The Thomas Network & More

More than 11,000 manufacturers are using Thomas WebTrax to turn anonymous website traffic into real, actionable leads for their businesses.

However, we understand that you may still have questions about WebTrax, how it fits in with other Thomas solutions, and how it stacks up to other tools available in the marketplace. Hopefully, this post clears things up and helps you decide which solution works best for your industrial business.