AKRON, OHIO (Jan. 23, 2:30 p.m. EST) – Officials from some of the polymer industry's highest-profile online exchanges and auction sites will participate in a panel at Plastics News' e-business briefing, to debate their firms' relative merits and differences. The session will include executives from ChemConnect Inc., CheMatch.com, FreeMarkets Inc., PlasticsNet.Com and SupplierMarket.com.
As of Jan. 21, the Feb. 22-23 event in New Orleans had space for only about 25 more attendees. There is room for about 200 total participants.
Time for the panel was created in part by the withdrawal from the program by planned Grainger Internet Commerce speaker Susan Mikulecky, whose role at the industrial supplies company changed as a result of a recent corporate restructuring.
Separately, Bradford C. Mattson, the top North American plastics official at building-products giant CertainTeed Corp., has agreed to participate in the Tuesday afternoon panel called "Redefining the Supply Chain." Mattson joins fellow panelists from Nypro Inc., Portola Packaging Inc. and IBM Corp. CertainTeed, a vinyl profiles and pipe extruder, recently signed on as a founding member of BuildNet.com, which aims to be an online distribution network from suppliers to their building-products distributors and their customers.
Meantime, the new Wednesday morning panel, called "Assessing the Market Makers," is designed to help attendees learn more about how these budding e-marketplaces function, and how they are attempting to differentiate themselves from one another.
Panelists will include: George Avdey, vice president of plastics sales at Houston's ChemConnect; Don Churchman, vice president of plastics at Houston-based CheMatch.com; Jim Morelli, VP of sales at Chicago's Commerx Inc., developers of PlasticsNet.Com; Jim Zuffoletti, manager-diversified manufacturing for Pittsburgh-based auction service FreeMarkets; and Jon Burgstone, co-founder and chief executive officer at SupplierMarket.com in Burlington, Mass. Bruce Gordon, a former Geon Co. operations officer who is now a Cleveland-based associate partner in Andersen Consulting's chemicals practice, will moderate.
The full, day-and-a-half-long program will feature three panel sessions, 22 speakers and additional keynote addresses from Cisco Systems Inc. and Forrester Research Inc. More details can be found on this Web site, at www.plasticsnews.com/e-briefing.