San Diego-based Trade Service recently announced a milestone achievement of more than 1,000 electrical contractors using Supplier Xchange, Trade Service's offering that provides electrical distributors the ability to connect with their contractors and provide them with their pricing in real time. Contractors can send a list of materials to Supplier Xchange from their estimating program where it's matched against their selected supplier's inventory file. Within seconds, their specific pricing is returned to them for direct import into their bid. This capability significantly helps the contractor produce more competitive bids, potentially winning more of the jobs they bid on.
Currently, more than 2,700 electrical distributor locations are supporting Supplier Xchange, and this number continues to grow. "The strongest demand for Supplier Xchange came from contractors who needed a way to acquire a more realistic level of pricing that could be quickly accessed during bid preparation," says Tod Moore, senior VP of sales and marketing for Trade Service. "And we are pleased that the industry's major estimating software providers have actively responded to this critical need for their clients by writing the programs to make it work within their applications."
"Supplier Xchange is a great response to a need that’s been growing over recent years, for a quicker, more accurate way to obtain bid pricing," says Todd McCormick, president of McCormick Systems, one of the industry's leading estimating software companies states. "Traditional factoring methods used with published industry pricing have served their purpose over the years, but it's gotten increasingly difficult to come up with just the right multiplier that can give the estimator a sharp enough pencil to win the bid and still make a decent profit. Supplier Xchange solves this problem."
Supplier Xchange, a component of TRA-SER SX, Trade Service's latest Internet-based electronic catalog and pricing service, was launched just over 18 months ago in the United States and more recently in Canada. The Supplier Xchange platform supports more than $300 million in quote activity each month, totaling over $2 billion to-date and is provided at no additional cost to all TRA-SER SX subscribers as well as to all suppliers who subscribe to any of Trade Service's electronic pricing services.
