Episode Details

Connect with Alan Davis

Email: alan.davis@i5services.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alandavissolutiondevelopment/

Website: https://i5services.com/

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce you to our guest today, Alan Davis. Alan is the founding member and CEO of I5 Services. He started i5 services to change industries through creative technical solutions to complex business problems. His background is in technology and years of experience, leadership, and the transformation process. For the last eight years, he has been working tirelessly to connect the U.S. manufacturing supply chain.

Alan, welcome to the show.

Alan Davis: Thanks for having me today, Lisa. Great to be with you.

Lisa Ryan: Alan, please share with us some of your background. What led you to focus on manufacturing and then the founding of i5 services?

Alan Davis: Great question. In 2001, I was involved in another industry. We came up with an innovative solution for the airline industry when 9/11 happened, and the airline industry was somewhat devastated at that point and having a hard time recovering. Our solution had a huge impact on the client that we were working for - about 40 million dollars a year. That solution opened our eyes. That technology is still being used today; almost all the world's major airlines use it. But it helped the airline industry at a time when it needed it. That opened my eyes to the fact that there was this great need for some very innovative technical solutions that would solve very complex business problems. These solutions would have a direct impact on the bottom line for our clients. They would also have a dramatic impact positively on the entire industry or ecosystem that they serve.

Fast forward a few years. The downturn of the economy happened. I got a nice severance package from my former employer, and we started i5 Services. Here at i5 services, we focus on manufacturing. A couple of years after we had started the company, an economic development study was done in the state of Utah to determine how to improve the various economic sectors. Part of that study was that in manufacturing, they decided that they needed a virtual industrial park.

It was this ability to connect manufacturers with each other. The idea was that if a prominent manufacturer could buy local first, it would keep more jobs, more dollars in the state, and therefore boost the economy overall in manufacturing. We were selected to build the solution for that, along with Utah Manufacturers Association. We brought together manufacturers from around the state. We probably had 30 or 40 manufacturers participate, and over four months, we held workshops every other Friday for four hours.

We got in the conference room, and we dug deep into why the solution was needed? Why weren't the existing solutions out there solving the problem? What were the benefits of doing this? It was a very informative and enlightening process because we truly understood that our manufacturing ecosystem is not connected well as we went through this. In fact, not well at all to the point where we have a hard time finding manufacturing capabilities. Anyone who had their eyes open during the pandemic will certainly understand challenges and problems in the supply chain. As we were looking at the problem, the manufacturers said this to me - and I thought this was eye-opening - they said, go to any solution that's out there today, any search engine, and try to search and find all the women-owned plastic injection molding companies in the state of Utah and tell me what you see. You cannot get a comprehensive set of results in any solution out there other than the one that we built at that time for the state of Utah.