As a veteran of the chemical industry, I’m struck by how slow the uptake of digital commerce has been. We’ve worn the label of laggard for decades and, while many attempts have been made over the last 30+ years, adoption of digital commerce technologies and processes have failed to grow into any significance. Most of the multibillion-dollar firms I worked with (including our customers and suppliers) never approached conducting even 10% of their business via digital commerce.
Since launching ChemVM, we've received lots of great questions from chemical suppliers, such as How much does ChemVM cost?, When can I start getting leads?, How do suppliers sign up?, and many others. We've compiled answers into an FAQ for chemical service providers' easy reading and reference.
We were thrilled to have our first engineering intern start with ChemVM this spring. I asked Sean to take a few minutes to introduce himself, what drew him to engineering and what he's contributing at ChemVM.
RG: Tell us a little about yourself - where are you from, where do you go to school and why you took the year off with COVID?
SS: My name is Sean Scadden, and I am currently an intern at ChemVM. I am originally from Oregon but have recently moved to Utah. I will be starting my senior year at Stevens Institute of Technology. I would have been graduating this May of 2021; however, I took the year off. I decided that instead of earning an online degree I would use this year to further develop and learn more skills by interning at ChemVM. To me, this plan made the most sense as I have learned far more about the chemical engineering industry and business side than I would have in Zoom classes.
At ChemVM, our mission is to find Best-Fit matches between customers and service providers for chemical processing projects. But what does “Best-Fit” mean, you may ask?
To us, Best-Fit means that a project helps you, the custom or toll chemical manufacturer, contract formulator or packager, realize your goals as a service provider to:
- Maximize profits
- Develop strategic capabilities
- Increase stability and predictability of your sales pipeline and capacity utilization
Let's dive into each of these and further explore why they are so important to help chemical service providers succeed in their business.