Efficiency was the word used when Scania found its new suppliers

The big advantage of digital meetings is efficiency. That is the opinion of Tobias Camitz, who’s Wednesday during Elmia Subcontractor Connect was filled with as many as twelve well-planned meetings.

- I think that the whole arrangement, with search options and the opportunities to make contact before the meeting, made it very effective for me. Prior to the meeting, I was able to share my basic requirements for starting any form of collaboration and we were able to remove some of the question marks in advance. When we then came to the meeting, we could go directly into what the supplier has to offer, where in the process they are and what the future looks like. In this way, I see digital meetings as being much more efficient than they usually are at real fairs, he says.

Effective meetings are of course one thing. But they must also give results. Tobias Camitz thinks that his twelve meetings really paid dividends. And, if all goes well, he has also found a couple of new suppliers.

- The meetings will provide a baseline for further dialogue. We will now follow up on our meetings and if they still feel right, there will be an internal process where we will then have further discussions with one of the companies. Hopefully there are one or two who, in the longer term, can become a supplier for us. It is a long process and by no means guaranteed, but we have received some concrete information that we can certainly look at further, he says.

Of course, digital meetings may be a little more impersonal than physical meetings. But there are other reasons why the digital and the physical are a good complement to one another.

- Digital meetings provide a higher degree of efficiency, both when it comes to getting the right contacts and during the meetings themselves. I feel that there is a natural tendency to stick more to the timings of a meeting when it is digital rather than when it is physical. There is not as much chit-chat but much more focus on the meeting itself, he concludes.