SPX act as centres for technical information, match-making and promotion as well as clearing-houses for industrial subcontracting and partnership enquiries and opportunities.

The SPXs proposed and established by UNIDO have sometimes had over 20 years’ experience in the area of advice and services provided to enterprises that use subcontracting arrangements. The supplier development programme should, once a certain stage of maturity is reached, become a goal that is incorporated in the tasks of the SPXs, which are thus perceived as actual centres for the development of enterprise competitiveness, especially in the case of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).UNIDO began to investigate this approach systematically in 1995.