Three ways you can use AI to speed up your nearshoring initiative

Nearshoring – finding suppliers in regions closer to your manufacturing locations, is getting more difficult for US and Canadian companies looking for suppliers in Mexico. 

Specifically, it’s getting harder to find suppliers with the right capabilities, capacity, and willingness to do business. Demand has grown faster than supply in many instances. 

When conducting supplier searches for clients, we generally start with 8-15 suppliers that appear to meet their detailed criteria, then narrow the list down to 4-6 through an interview process. Because each company’s requirements are specific to their needs, we often have to go beyond the suppliers we’ve dealt with in the past. 

The most productive means of doing this is tapping our network of purchasing professionals that source similar suppliers and contacts at regional manufacturing clusters or direct material suppliers. When we still need more, we’ll turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini to scour supplier websites. 

Here’s three prompts you can use:

AI chatbots can’t tell you if a supplier has the capacity you need (you’ll need to contact them), but it can shorten the time to generate a short list of suppliers to reach out to.  

1. Identify potential suppliers with specific capabilities and locations 

List the manufacturing capabilities, quality certifications, industries etc. you want that are likely to be on company websites.   

Example Prompt 

As a buyer for an automotive supplier, list 10 plastic injection molding suppliers that are IATF 16949 certified, have manufacturing locations in Northern Mexico, and identify overmolding as a service. Provide links to their web sites (English-language if available). 

2. Identify potential suppliers based on supplier names you already know 

Sometimes you’ll get better results if can provide a starting point such as known suppliers that meet the requirements you’re searching for. 

Example Prompt 

You are a buyer at a manufacturing company. You currently buy overmolded plastic components from Waterra, Manyser, and MMI Engineered solutions out of their Mexican locations. Identify five other potential suppliers of overmolded plastic components that manufacture in Northern Mexico. 

3. Identify potential foreign suppliers that have manufacturing in a specific region 

There’s been a lot of investment by non-Mexican companies in building capacity in Mexico.  This is another creative way to prompt the AI for your supplier search.  

Example Prompt 

As a buyer, you want to identify suppliers of overmolded plastic components with headquarters located outside of Mexico that have established or expanded manufacturing operations in Mexico in the past four years. Search the web to create a table with up to 5 suppliers showing the company name, headquarters country, and url.

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