Improving Research, Design, & Manufacturing » Technical Search

What happens after a engineering project is posted?

T. Brian Jones — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:20:20 +0000

The idea behind Industrial Interface is pretty simple. Engineers need stuff and suppliers sell stuff. We put the two groups together in a very efficient way. An engineer describes what she is looking for in detail, and our system puts her project in front of relevant suppliers who might be able to help. If they can help, they pay us a fee (to encourage high quality connections and keep the service running) and then they can contact her. That sure was simple. Now I’m going to give you the details.

Step 1: Engineer posts a project

The first step on our site is an engineer posting a specific application for which a solution or a supplier is needed. An engineer looking for a small heating unit is a great example of a project and you can see the level of detail that we ask for. The goal with a project is for the engineer to clearly outline what he is trying to do, the technical requirements of the application, and any other details that allow a supplier to recognize whether or not he can provide what the engineer needs (detailed description of an engineering project posting).

Step 2: System identifies relevant suppliers

Once an engineer submits a project, our system goes to work. It processes the project and identifies relevant suppliers within our system based on their detailed supplier profiles. Our system also searches outside our database and finds relevant suppliers via industrial directories and supplier websites. The goal is to find as many suppliers as we can that both sell what the engineer needs, and sell it in the engineer’s region.

Our system will often identify dozens of relevant suppliers (sometimes hundreds), and at that point, it sends an email to them all notifying them of the project. The link they get takes them to a project page that looks like this screenshot.

Step 3: Suppliers review project

At this point, a supplier can review the location of the engineer, the company size, industry, and all the technical details of the application. The supplier then makes a well informed decision about the project. If it’s a good fit for his business, then he can purchase the lead and contact the engineer. If he doesn’t have an account, he is forced to complete one before contacting any members of Industrial Interface. Both parties are then alerted of the match.

If the supplier doesn’t sell what the engineer needs, then he can simply click “Share This Lead” and send the project along to another supplier that can help. This is often how suppliers get the best leads, and we have simply streamlined the process through our system. How nice is it not to repeat your project on the phone to dozens of different salespeople?

Step 4: Engineer finds solution and supplier

After suppliers click contact, both parties are alerted of the match and a connection is made. Our goal is to put engineers in touch with five suppliers for every project they post: the optimal number that doesn’t overwhelm engineers and buyers and keeps our suppliers excited about their chance of winning business. Usually this connection happens within a few days of a project being posted to our site, but we’ve seen it happen as quickly as a few minutes, and we’re getting better every day. Over 90% of projects posted by engineers have been contacted by relevant suppliers. Once you find what you need, simply login and close your project and no one else will be able to contact you.

Why this works so well?

Industrial Interface eliminates the hassle of finding parts and puts engineers and buyers in direct contact with local sales reps who have already screened the application and know that they sell exactly what is needed. Wow! That is so simple. How did anyone find parts before Industrial Interface?

Give it a try

Industrial Interface is always free for engineers and buyers to use, and it only takes a few minutes to create an account and post your first project. Remember to enter as much information as you can about your application so that our system can eliminate suppliers that aren’t relevant to your need. (read more about posting a complete project)

How do engineers and buyers currently find products and services online?

T. Brian Jones — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:15:28 +0000

Right now, and I mean right this second… there are thousands of engineers and technical buyers searching for industrial products, components, materials, and services across hundreds of industries and thousands of product categories. The web traffic on industrial directories alone is on the order of 500,000 visits per day.

These searches end in a page that links to hundreds of suppliers for a specific category (5,300 in adhesives on Thomasnet,1,300 on Macrae’s Blue Book, and 1,100 results on Globalspec). “Look now many suppliers we have.” This seems exciting but is an absolute nightmare for someone looking for products. What’s next? The engineer or buyer has to:

click through dozens of supplier websites
review products and guess if each company sells what he needs
call a central number and describe his application
get connected to a manager and describe his application
wait for a call from a local rep to describe his application
contact a distributor to actually purchase the product
get referred to another company because this one doesn’t have what he needs
start over!

Let suppliers find you

Industrial Interface eliminates all this mess and puts engineers and buyers in direct contact with a local sales rep who has already screened the application and knows that he sells exactly what is needed. Wow! That is so simple. Why not share your application with our community and let suppliers find you?

How do we do this

Our suppliers create incredibly detailed profiles where they input all of the products, services, and certifications for the companies that they sell products for. We use this data to match your projects with relevant suppliers both inside and outside of our system.

Our industrial search engine

If you aren’t ready to post a project to an open system, at least give our aggregated industrial search engine a try. We’ve compiled 40 of the best search sites into a custom Google search engine that makes it quicker and more efficient to find what you’re looking for. Why not search all 40 of these sites at once?

Making our suppliers more accessible to engineers

T. Brian Jones — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 01:50:00 +0000

When industrial salespeople sign up for our site, they complete a detailed supplier profile including their products and services. Our system stores all this information in a database, and we use it to match engineering projects to the right suppliers. To show this we built some quick links to basic search pages that list this information in an easily to read way. We’re hoping by making this data accessible, our users will gain a deeper understanding of how our system works.

Search suppliers by products they sell: Anaerobic Adhesives, Power Supplies, Solenoid Valves, Vacuum Pumps… Search by the thousands of products that suppliers have indicated they sell.
Search suppliers by services they offer: Looking for a job shop that does Rotary Die Cutting or a rep firm specializing in UV Bonding? Search suppliers by the thousands of services that they have indicated they offer.
Search suppliers by companies they represent: One of the most unique datasets that Industrial Interface maintains about it’s suppliers is a list of the companies they represent. Engineers are often looking for a product from a specific manufacturer, but don’t always know who rep’s that manufacturer in their region. Our system captures this data and makes it easy to find all the suppliers of products made by 3M, Rogers Corp., or all the companies our suppliers list.
Search suppliers by certifications they maintain: It’s often difficult to find suppliers with certain niche certifications that you need for an application. Here is a great way to find them: ISO13485, Class 100 Clean Room, ITAR Compliant…

Help suppliers help you by posting complete project details to Industrial Interface

T. Brian Jones — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:08:29 +0000

The first time engineers post a design project to Industrial Interface, they usually don’t write a book about their application. We get it. First time on some weird website… why would you waste your time filling out a long form? When we see these vague projects we reach out to get the details and welcome you to the community. It’s during that conversation that you really open up. You tell us all about your application, what you’re trying to do, what the big project is, problems you are having, things you’ve tried, etc.

This is the same conversation you have with a new supplier on the phone, we’re just making it more efficient through our website. So take a minute to read through all the sections below and learn how you can best complete a project posting to get the maximum value out of your time, and hopefully, find the exact supplier of the exact solution you are looking for. Each section below corresponds to a form field on our site when you post your sourcing need. I’ve included some real examples from our users in some sections that should help you out. First, I’ll let you see a great example of a complete project.

Descriptive Title

Type a few words (no more than one sentence) that clearly states what you are looking for or what you are trying to do. Suppliers are just as busy as you are and they need a high level picture of what your application is from this one line. Use important keywords and action terms. Here are some great examples of descriptive titles.

1) PCB Fabrication for small prototype runs
2) Miniature ultrasonic oven / heater
3) Adhesive to bond nylon 66 to PVC

Design Problem or Sourcing Need

What is your application and how are you trying to solve it? Sometimes you’ll be able to clearly articulate what you are looking for, like in the project above (Adhesive to bond nylon 66 to PVC) but other times, you may only know what you are trying to accomplish, and you won’t have a specific solution yet. Be clear about this and don’t guess.

If you know you need to seal electronic components from corrosive plant conditions, but don’t know what the best method is, then describe the size of your control box, the materials, the closing mechanism, how the box seals, the temperatures it will see and the corrosive agents involved. Suppliers have helped solve dozens of problems just like this one and will be able to quickly tell you what you need.

This is the meat of your posting. Be as detailed as you can and exlain every detail no matter how mundane you think it is. All of this information helps suppliers understand your application and find the right product from their inventory. If you are vague, you may miss out on a solution that you will never find on your own, and you’ll end up talking to a bunch of suppliers who don’t sell what you need. Remember, posting your project in detail helps eliminate suppliers who aren’t relevant to your project, and saves everyone a lot of time.

Here is a great example from the project titled “Miniature ultrasonic oven / heater,” in the screenshot above:

I am looking for an “oven” or “heater” that can heat equivalently to 150C-200C. Similar to the product described on www.soniwave.com, however I need one where the oven is very small, approx. 1cm x 1cm x 1cm, which should mean that the ultrasonic delivery mechanism is small. This may need a custom engineered solution. Oven will be powered via external power supply. There is some flexibility in terms of size. I would prefer a COTS solution, but can not find anything this small.

Required Specifications

This section allows you to list technical details about your application that a supplier or product must meet to be acceptable and useful for your design. If the parts you are trying to glue together will see temperatures of 350 degrees C, then you need the adhesive to hold up to those temperatures. Put that information here. See another example below from the same heater project.

-Heating target material 150C-200C (oven is small 1cm x 1cm x 1cm)
-Temperature shall be controllable
-Overall unit size must be small, approximately hand-size

Ideal Specifications

Here you can list details that you would really like to have, but that aren’t absolutely necessary. If you’d like the adhesive above to still hold at 500 degrees C, put that here, but make sure to list the absolute minimum requirement (350C) under Required Specifications.

Required Volumes

This section gives a supplier an idea of how big your application is. Make sure to list both the current volumes you are looking to purchase right away, as well as the eventual volumes you might see in a production run. This helps suppliers of the right size find applications that are good fit for their capabilities. (eg. 100 for prototype, 1000/day in production) Some suppliers might have a great part at a great price for prototyping, but won’t be able to meet your production needs.

Project Stage

Select Research & Design if you are simply planning. Select Prototype if you are looking for low quantities for test runs. Select Manufacture if you have reached the final stage of your design and need your full volume of parts. Selecting this stage properly helps suppliers know whether you want direction and insight into your application or simply need quotes on parts for production.

Solution Needed By

When do you absolutely need this solution by? Remember that most applications will take a minimum of a few weeks to work out even with the most responsive and knowledgable suppliers.

Delivery Outside U.S.

Select Yes only if the products or services you are looking for need to be sent outside the US. Some suppliers may sell exactly what you need, but may not have the proper licences or infrastructure to send your parts where you need them. Let them know before they waste everyone’s time contacting you about an application they ultimately can’t help with.

Required Supplier Certifications

If you need your supplier to meet any specific criteria like ISO9001, list those criteria here. This helps eliminate suppliers who sell what you need but don’t meet your company’s requirements.

Known Solutions or Alternatives

What parts or solutions have you already investigated that work? Why are you trying to replace them? These details can save time by eliminating duplicate suppliers. This also gives suppliers a good sense of what you are not trying to do for this specific design application. If you have a solution from another supplier that just isn’t right, list that part or information and supplier name. Lots of suppliers know their competitors product lines and know the exact substitute for what you are trying to do.

Stuff You’ve Tried That Doesn’t Work

If you’ve already tried things that don’t work, you don’t want a supplier contacting you with the same broken solution. List everything here that you’ve tried. Be specific about what it was, how you implemented it, and why it didn’t work.

Attach Files

Here is your chance to provide a visual aid to augment all your explanations above. Whenever possible, attach pictures and drawings of your application. Date sheets, notes, pdfs, powerpoints, and sketches are all great additions to make your project complete for anyone reviewing it.

Post a Project - Login | Create an Engineering Account

How our suppliers get found via a detailed profile

Chris Powell — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:28:38 +0000

This post is meant for all the Technical Salespeople using Industrial Interface.

If you’re involved with industrial B2B sales and have not earned business from an Industrial Interface lead, then you are missing out! In this post I want to teach you how to maximize the likelihood of winning business from the hundreds of engineering and manufacturing firms using Industrial Interface.

Getting noticed

Suppliers with complete Industrial Interface profiles receive emails notifying them when relevant business opportunities have been posted to Industrial Interface. If you have not completed your profile, you are missing out on business leads coming through our site, and we have no way to let you know. It’s free to sign up, so if you haven’t already, sign up now and complete your profile! Within 10 minutes you will be viewing dozens of relevant business opportunities related to the products and services you offer, and you’ll be helping our engineers do their jobs more efficiently.

See an example of a complete profile from David Stewart of Apex Machine Tool below:

Personal Bio

Think of this as the place to brag about yourself and why you are the best person to help Engineers. They view your bio as a way to relate to you on a personal level. Use this field to quickly establish rapport with an Engineer.

Product Categories

Check all of the different major categories of products you sell. The categories you select will help us to figure out what type of projects you are interested in seeing. Keep the deals related to you by just selecting the categories of products and services that are home run applications for you, or where you know enough to share these projects with other suppliers who can help.

Sales Region

We know that you only receive credit for sales in your territories, but that different products often have different territories. Choose all of the regions in which you represent at least one product. This will ensure you don’t miss out on any potential applications.

Companies you work for or represent

If you are a direct OEM representative, you will probably only list one company here. If you are a manufacturer’s representative, list your rep organization as well as all of the companies that you are a representative for. Industrial Interface is the only site that tracks this information and it’s an extremely valuable aspect of your supplier profile.

Product Keywords

This is one of the most important fields. Make this field as complete as possible, but only list the products that you directly represent. If you represent a company that does custom cables, but sometimes you buy power sources and wire them, DO NOT put power sources here. You will receive projects of engineers who are looking for power sources. Keep this field directly to the keywords of products that are your specialty.

Service Keywords

Many of the projects that come through Industrial Interface require a custom service of some sort. Die-cutting, Assembly, Design, and Injection Molding are just a few of the more popular services that Engineers look for on our site. Once again, focus on the services that you perform internally. Tell us what your core competencies are, not the stuff that you farm out to other manufacturers.

Certifications

Tell us all the certifications that your company has paid thousands of dollars to get. When a big aerospace company posts a project, they require AS9100 certifications. If you have this certification, and don’t list it here, you won’t see their project.

Website

Put your website here. If your company does not have a website, please contact us about how we can get a partner landing page up for you: powell@industrialinterface.com or 858.633.8158

Your picture

Show off that gorgeous mug of yours and make your profile more personal by adding a photo.

Other profile information

These can be accessed at the bottom of the edit profile page.

Upload Files – The more files you upload to our site, the better your profile will be ranked by google and the more engineers will find you. Case Studies, Product data sheets, catalogs, linecards, and other information in formats including: .doc .xls .ppt .pdf or .txt can be indexed to complete your profile. These files can be downloaded by Engineers.

My Account – This is where you can change any of your personal information associated with your account.

What Next?

Now that you have completed your Industrial Interface supplier account, get excited to buy some leads and win some new business. We are excited to help grow your business and are always excited to hear from our users with suggestions on how to make the supplier profile even more complete.

From time to time we write blog posts that promote suppliers with complete and detailed profiles to all of the engineers that visit Industrial Interface. The first step to getting this honor is to complete your profile in as much detail as you can. Contact me with any questions at powell@industrialinterface.com and leave your profile link in the comments to enter the Supplier of the Year contest.

Industrial parts search on steroids

T. Brian Jones — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:02:41 +0000

I know a lot of people still like to browse online industrial listings even though Industrial Interface will do all that work for you, so we created a great little search engine that indexes 40 of the most popular and comprehensive listings on the web.

One of the many problems with these listings is that a specific search like “fda approved pressure sensitive adhesive” will usually only result in a listing of adhesive companies. On a few of these 40 sites, however, there will be a specific listing for fda approved adhesives. Using our aggregate search (powered by Google Custom Search), you can put in more specific searches like this and quicly identify the listing site with the most relevant / niche category to browse.

Is clicking through categories reasonable anymore?

You still get lost in a sea of suppliers once you find your desired niche, but that’s a topic for another post.

If you want to bypass all this needless searching and research, try posting your design application to our site and let suppliers find you and compete for your business. It’s much quicker and much easier. Don’t you just want to get back to working on your designs anyway? Watch our new video below to see how Industrial Interface works.

77,000 freely searchable engineering material datasheets

T. Brian Jones — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:41:15 +0000

MatWeb is easily the most comprehensive materials database freely available on the web. When I used to work as a deign engineer I probably went to MatWeb at least a couple times a week.

As of this post, MatWeb has over 77,000 materials in it’s searchable database, and they are all free to access, although there are advanced features (advanced search, side-by-side material comparisons, data download capabilities) that require you to register for a free account. Premium accounts cost $100 per year and give you increased search and comparison functionality and the ability to download materials right into your favorite design software.

MatWeb has an incredibly vast catalog of materials. You can usually find even the most obscure material. For plastics and other branded materials, you can usually find the datasheet for the specific branded version, meaning you know the difference between an HDPE made by Dupont, and an HDPE made by 3M (although the subtle variances are sometimes eaten up in manufacturing tolerances). For example, a search for HDPE actually yields more than 1,400 results.

A Search for HDPE

The Datasheet for a Generic Injection Molded HDPE

Below are all the search options offered on the site:

Advanced Search – MatWeb’s most powerful search tool allows users to build complex searches in an iterative process. Possible criteria are property, composition, material category, and user-input text options. (Registration Required).
Material Property Search – Find materials that meet the property value ranges that you require.
Metal Composition Search – Enter an elemental composition and find the matching alloys.
Material Type/Category Search – Select the type of material in which you are interested from a systematic list of drop-down boxes.
Manufacturer Name Search – Select a plastics manufacturer and find data sheets of their proprietary products listed in MatWeb.
Trade Name Search – Select a plastics trade name and find data sheets listed in MatWeb.
Polymer Film Search – Find film grade polymers that meet the property value ranges that you require.
Lubricant Search – Find lubricants that meet the property value ranges that you require.
Metal Alloy UNS Number – Select from the list of UNS numbers in MatWeb’s database and find the matching data sheets.

Search 30 million technical journal articles. Read any of them for $0.99.

T. Brian Jones — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 02:04:03 +0000

There are a lot of free trade magazines available for engineers and designers. These can be fun to read, and have lots of great pictures to flip through when you’re bored at work. How often do you actually find yourself referencing one of these free magazines, however, when you have a truly complex technical problem that needs solving? Probably never. You search google and you may search some engineering forums, but odds are what you’re looking for is tucked away in an expensive, subscription only, unsearchable academic journal. So how do you find this information? Enter DeepDyve.

DeepDyve allows you to search it’s database of over 30 million scientific, technical, and medical articles from distinguished journals. You can preview any article for free to see if it covers the topic you need. If it does, you simple rent the article for $0.99. The full text is then made available to you for 24 hours. The basic account even comes with 5 free rentals to try the system out. If you use it often, there are premium accounts that give you a certain number of articles for free every month for a reasonable subscription fee.

Anyone who has ever searched academic databases will be happy to see how simple the search technology is with DeepDyve. You don’t have to be an expert with search operators to find what you need, and you won’t get lost in disorganized and ambiguous results pages. You can search in the same way that you search on google. Of course, for more complex searches, you can access advanced search functions. See DeepDyve’s search below, compared to a LexisNexis search page.

Advanced Search on DeepDyve

LexisNexis Search Page

Many engineers may have had access to these articles and other traditional databases that index them while in school, but unless you work for a very large engineering firm, or are still in academia, these journals are probably completely inaccessible to you now. What’s so compelling about DeelDyve is that it gives every engineer at every company access to critical high tech information for their designs. You can even buy these with your own dollar, meaning you don’t need to waste time, or ‘valuable company resources’ trying to find the information you need. DeepDyve is a great site for every engineer that likes to fully understand every aspect of his or her design decisions.

Share this Project! How our users are finding more efficient ways to use IndustrialInterface.com.

T. Brian Jones — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:07:33 +0000

During my first few months as an engineer out of college I designed an assembly that would allow me to tighten a knurled nut, increase friction between multiple surfaces, and ultimately regulate the torque applied between a motor and a shaft. I spent weeks iterating this design and probably a few thousand dollars in machining time before I realized I could buy what I needed for a few hundred dollars from dozens of companies within 50 miles of my plant.

If this hadn’t also been a learning experience, would this have been a dumb thing to do? I’m a little more versed in available products now, so finding a simple clutch mechanism would be a no brainer, right? Actually, I think the answer to both of these questions is an emphatic NO.

Engineering applications are so complex and so varied that industrial products have to come in thousands of variations to satisfy even the most basic set of circumstances. That clutch could be made of hundreds of different materials, be designed for shafts varying from 1/32″ to a few feet, need to be electrically insulating (or conductive), work in snow and ice, work in dusty environments, maintain the same torque at 1 rpm or 500,000 rpm, among hundreds of other specs. Beyond that, the number of basic clutch designs could fill a catalog on their own.

The Problem

When engineers tackle applications that are outside their past experience, they aren’t going to know what products to use or what’s even available. Often, they don’t even know where to start looking. I once spent weeks searching for a machine that would let me mix water with detergent at a ratio of 1:200±5. Once I figured out what it was called, and who sold them, it turned out there were dozens on the market.

The initial research was not useful and was hardly educational. It was time wasted finding an obscure product that I’ll never need again. This is common in R&D.

In both the stories above, I found myself repeating my problem over and over again-on the phone to inside sales people and outside sales engineers, to other engineers in my office and to my manager, to the maintenance guys and the machinists. Eventually the collaboration of all these people offering their input resulted in me finding what I needed.

The Industrial Interface Solution

The effectiveness of this collaboration is one of the major reasons we built Industrial Interface. The point is that little gets done in manufacturing without a handful (if not dozens) of minds working together–engineers, purchasers, managers, machinists, suppliers, and others. Why continue to have the same conversation over and over again? This is why we have created a way for engineers, purchasers, maintenance, an others to create a Sourcing Profile and easily share it with dozens of relevant suppliers.

What we didn’t realize was how much our users would be leveraging this feature themselves to communicate with colleagues. We had thought this was mostly a buyer to supplier relationship, but it’s not, and our customers are showing us this. Once a Sourcing Profile is created, our users are sharing it with anyone who can help move their project forward, be it colleagues or suppliers.

How Does It Work?

Industrial Interface let’s you post all the details of a sourcing need or design problem. You can outline the problem, lay out design specs, list required supplier certifications, volumes, lead times, etc… Then you have a Sourcing Profile that you can send along to colleagues and suppliers with the click of a button. Hit “Share this Lead” enter a few email addresses, and you’re off and running.

In the mean time, Industrial Interface’s proprietary software identifies relevant suppliers and also shares your project with them… so you don’t have to. You don’t even need to be aware that they exist. You remain anonymous through this process until these suppliers create accounts on our system, get approved, and pay to contact you. That’s how we ensure you only get contacted by relevant suppliers who can act as a technical resource.

Right now we’ve reduced weeks of sourcing to a few days, and are seeing engineers find the right suppliers within 10 minutes sometimes. As our system grows, and more engineers and suppliers are using it, we hope to find our users working together in real time. Wouldn’t that be a great change?

An Example from our System

How do you most effectively find industrial products and services?

OpenThesis.org creates centralized database for academic theses

T. Brian Jones — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:23:52 +0000

OpenThesis.org is a free-to-use, centralized database of academic theses where anyone can upload their completed and approved thesis. Their system typically includes details like bibliographical information, author, school, title, abstract, and date of publication, but doesn’t always have the full text available.

This is a great system that allows engineers and designers doing bleeding edge research to find the mode definitive and up to date research on a topic. Although users will typically still have to contact the school to get the full text, these are often available on the publishing university’s library website, or can be obtained by contacting the department involved in the research. (Example: search theses at my alma mater, Vanderbilt University.)

OpenThesis.org describes their system as this:

“OpenThesis.org is a searchable thesis & dissertation database, which helps increase the availability and utility of these important documents.

Historically, theses and dissertations have not been freely accessible through a powerful, centralized database. Rather, they have been available at individual College and University web sites (if at all), often via the respective school’s ETD (Electronic Thesis and Dissertation) program. While these ETD programs are very important (indeed, they provide the bulk of the data used to create OpenThesis.org), the lack of a free, centralized database means that a global search of theses and dissertations has often not been possible.

OpenThesis addresses that issue, and by creating a centralized search, encourages the reading and use of these important documents. The benefits to the schools and authors are numerous, including greater recognition in the research community, collaboration and employment opportunities, and intellectual property licensing opportunities.”

Why purchasing agents and engineers hate each other! (Guest Post)

Al Gamble — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:12:12 +0000

In general, purchasing agents have a good deal of disdain for engineers (and probably vice-versa). This doesn’t have to be the case, but it generally is. Below is a list of reasons why this often happens. These two groups rarely work together in harmony, but with a little effort they probably can.

In my experience as a finder of hard to find metals, I get inquiries from buyers on a daily basis for metals, forms, sizes and quantities that are simply not available from US metal suppliers. Typically, the buyer has received a print from a client for a new widget designed by an engineer who has searched high and low to find “the perfect material” for his or her new design.

In the web age, material property data is easily available from sites like www.matweb.com and others. Unfortunately, these sites offer almost zero information about a key property: availability. The perfect material is not so perfect if you can’t buy it and unfortunately, many engineers make their material selection decisions with blinders on. We have a name for this type of metal – “unobtainium“.

Whenever I mention that term, both buyers and engineers rarely fail to chuckle. Problem is, unobtainium represents a major problem in many ways.

First, it creates a further wedge between buyers and engineers. Buyers often think that their engineering counterparts are “eggheads” to begin with. But when a print comes down for unobtainium, it forces the buyer to waste time trying to run it down – frustrating to say the least.

Second, even if the metal can be located, the suppliers know that they have something pretty rare and will charge a king’s ransom for it.

Third, if the metal just can’t be had at all, the print has to go back upstream, ending up on the engineers desk weeks if not months after his or her work has been done and they have to start all over again, analyzing the part, stresses, environmental issues, applications, etc……to find a metal that will work AND is available. The cost of required engineering changes can be enormous and it never had to happen IF the engineer had taken the time to check availability before the material went onto the print in the first place.

Finally and possibly the most dangerous outcome of this problem is, that some machine shops/ fabricators will take matters into their own hands and make a substitution. Whether or not the metal they choose actually ends up working for the application is meaningless – the fact remains that the part will not have the mechanical properties, or chemistry of the material originally specified. Nobody might find out about this, but maybe they will – like when the component fails in an Apollo fuel cell and three astronauts almost die as a result (check out these other posts on machinability and why to work with your machinists).

These are all situations that arise at my job where I try to help engineers and purchasing agents find the right materials for their jobs, but they are common to all sorts of sourcing issues. Engineers and purchasing agents need to work together early in projects, and finding the right components during concept and design is critical. These issues can usually be avoided with a little planning up front.

Alan Gamble
Metal Suppliers Online

Top 10 Features of Globalspec, Good & Bad (Online Industrial Supplier Listings Part II)

T. Brian Jones — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:03:19 +0000

Globalspec is probably the most popular of all the industrial supplier listings for engineers and designers. They boast 5 Million registered users, including engineers, purchasing agents, technicians, etc. They have a huge supplier database, and are branded as the Engineering Search Engine. Most other sites cater specifically to purchasing departments, although Globalspec’s offerings don’t differ much from the norm.

Highlights for Engineers and Designers

The Good

Globalspec has one of the largest supplier databases on the web, along with Thomasnet and Macrae’s Blue Book, and is one of the easiest supplier listing sites to navigate.
Globalspec maintains one of the largest engineering forums on the web. There’s an active community of engineers helping each other with simple to very technical problems.

Users can create a highly customizable home page, much like Google’s or Yahoo’s homeages where you can embed widgets and move them around. Globalspec can be used as your main portal to the internet at work.
Bold companies in search results are paying customers and there is generally a lot of good info about their products and services.
A new offering is a private area for users to manage projects and suppliers. It’s a simple interface, reminiscent of a PC file system, that let’s you track project details, suppliers you are working with, and any associated research or notes.
Newsletters, product alerts, & product announcements are constant and very detailed. There are dozens to choose from.

The Bad

Niche Categories? – Categories are well organized, but generally aren’t niche enough, leaving you with hundreds or thousands of companies to choose from in each sub category. Other sites like ThomasNet maintain more sub categories and make it easier to select companies to source from. Major companies that you already know about typically dominate the top of result pages.
The Engineering Search Engine is different but not noticeably better or more relevant than Google for general search. Globalspec does offer very specific search engines for material properties, patents, engineering standards, etc.
Search by Specs or Part Numbers – Users have a limited ability to search for parts and components by spec or part number, but only paying suppliers can add these detailed listings (and even that is severely limited by cost and time). This is great if you can buy from 1 of the 10 or so companies in any given category that is paying to list their products. Otherwise, this is limiting. Surprisingly, I’ve never found this useful as an engineer.
Privacy Concerns – Engineers and Buyers are required to register in quite a bit of detail to view company listings. Clear in their privacy policy, but rarely known by users, is that every time you click on a company that is paying for an account with Globalspec, that company receives a detailed report including your name, contact information, company and what you’ve been up to on Globalspec.

If you could add one feature to Globalpec, what would it be?