Mountain View, CA May 23, 2002 MarketMile, a hosted e-procurement service backed by American Express, has added several maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) suppliers to the company's pre-enabled supplier network.
New additions to MarketMile's supplier network include GE Supply, Lab Safety, Maintenance Warehouse, MSC Industrial and Wesco. They join Motion Industries and Newark Electronics as MRO suppliers participating in the network.
To be cost-effective, an e-procurement solution must encompass more than the purchase of office equipment and supplies it should extend the breadth of a company's indirect spending, said John Corsi, vice president for channel sales and supplier relations at MarketMile, which targets mid-market companies. And now, with the addition of these suppliers, MarketMile's clients can quickly access a complete catalog of MRO supplies.
GE Supply is a distributor of electrical, voice and datacom equipment and supplies from General Electric and other manufacturers. Lab Safety Supply is a direct marketer of industrial and safety supplies, off. Maintenance Warehouse, a Home Depot company, supplies maintenance, repair and replacement products for commercial properties.
MSC Supply is one of the largest U.S. direct marketers of industrial products to mid-sized businesses. WESCO International is a distributor of MRO products, construction materials and integrated supply procurement outsourcing services.
MRO product categories now available through MarketMile include cleaning and painting, electrical, hardware, tools, lighting, lubrication and hydraulics, pluming, safety and test equipment, and office and lab equipment. With its new MRO supplier partnerships, MarketMile said it has added more than 250,000 MRO product stock keeping units (SKUs) to its available catalog of more than 2 million SKUs.
"These partnerships bring a wide breadth of mission-critical MRO products to MarketMile's already expansive supplier network," said Tim Minahan, vice president of supply chain management research at technology consultancy Aberdeen Group. "MarketMile customers gain access to the goods necessary to keep their entire operations running efficiently and cost-effectively, from the corporate office suite to the factory floor."
MarketMile said its supplier network delivers a catalog covering more than 95 percent of the standard products in indirect spending categories such as office products, computer hardware and software, and maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) materials.
MarketMile offers e-procurement as a hosted service and takes responsibility for working with suppliers to prepare their catalog data for use by enterprise buyers. By pre-enabling strategic suppliers in key indirect spend categories, MarketMile said it is able to deploy its e-procurement solution within 30 days and can quickly on-ramp client-requested suppliers.
One of the key hurdles to the successful implementation of an e-procurement solution is supplier enablement, said Corsi. MarketMile helps its clients overcome this hurdle by providing a pre-enabled network of suppliers as part of its e-procurement solution."
