Information From Equipment Suppliers
Maybe you are asking the wrong people. I have never found the same reluctance to provide basic information, even at the preliminary project stage, when talking to competent, professional suppliers.
Michael Reid. ■
Possible Reason
Dear Mr. White,
some years ago when i was working on machine development projects for a consultancy company i experienced quite the same. The point is, those supplier companies may not see a "buyer" in you, but rather someone trying just to do what you yourself are understating them to be doing. Back then the natural reaction of supplier companies was or reluctance up until unfriendliness or a persistent wish to know details in order to find out the background. This i could quite understand, so i used two ways to convince: a) I spoke to them personally (no mail!!) in the name of the project client and if possible on its premises and b) I relayed as much information as possible.
When fishing there'll be no catch without bait, or hope, or $$...
One last point: If you will need just one unit of each device, you have to consider yourself a small client, you will not meet key account people, perhaps not get first row treatment and maybe (really maybe) be considered a expendable contact.
So in the end you'll have to find a interested supplying company, such search can be quite tedious.
Maybe you can look into smaller suppliers, or outside Aus?
Best wishes & regards!
R. ■
Re: Information From Equipment Suppliers
Originally Posted by Roland Heilmann
some years ago when i was working on machine development projects for a consultancy company i experienced quite the same. The point is, those supplier companies may not see a "buyer" in you, but rather someone trying just to do what you yourself are understating them to be doing. Back then the natural reaction of supplier companies was or reluctance up until unfriendliness or a persistent wish to know details in order to find out the background. This i could quite understand, so i used two ways to convince: a) I spoke to them personally (no mail!!) in the name of the project client and if possible on its premises and b) I relayed as much information as possible.
When fishing there'll be no catch without bait, or hope, or $$...
One last point: If you will need just one unit of each device, you have to consider yourself a small client, you will not meet key account people, perhaps not get first row treatment and maybe (really maybe) be considered a expendable contact.
So in the end you'll have to find a interested supplying company, such search can be quite tedious.
Maybe you can look into smaller suppliers, or outside Aus?
Best wishes & regards!
R.
Thanks. I see your point, only my client is a multi-national company, and they know who it is and how much they have already sold to them in the past 12 to 18 months. In this time there have been two upgrades of process lines probably getting close to $1 million in all. The thing is that if this proposal gets the go-ahead, then it could well be installed in the other plants here in Australia.
Just to get a budget figure, we are having to resort to looking through out quotes for similar items, applying some sort of index to them to being the prices up to date and so on. What this means is that to put the proposal to head office will see the budget figure with a lot more fat than it probably needs because we have to cover ourselves.
Look, I could understand it if these suppliers were flat out and turning work away. They aren't, and are their own worst enemies.
Over 20 years ago I worked for a large contracting company in the mining industry. The General Manager decided that we had to review the jobs we were quoting on. He figured we needed $1 million a year to operate on. He reasoned that we would only win 1 in 10 tenders we bid on, and that we could logically only bid on say 10 tenders per year (around 4 weeks to put together a bid) of the size he felt we had to bid on, and with a profit margin of say 10%, this meant that we had to bid on jobs that were at least $10 million. Anything less and we could not survive.
Well, we passed up many small tenders because they did not meet this criteria. The only problem was that if we bid on a smaller job, in many cases we would not have been required to bid on a larger more lucrative job with the same client. This did not figure in his calculations. Eventually that company ceased operations.
Had we bid on the smaller jobs and won them, we would have made enough to keep the company afloat, but he could not argue with the mathematics he had worked through.
What I am saying is that deciding that an inquiry is not valuable is fraught with danger. You never know when you are passing up on a "gateway" job. ■
Re
If your company is a known contact, a buyer and a more than marginal player, how that, then??? Maybe you know some other contacts with the possible suppliers, preferably persons? Sometimes it's necessary to call on a number a bit up in the ranks in order to get things right! And also just for test, how they react on customer satisfaction. A supplier that makes trouble when in project will certainly deliver trouble when in business..
R. ■
Information
My company deals with many confidential situations and, where necessary, a confidentiallity agreement will cover sensitive items for development or secret processes. Provided basic process information is given on duty I would see no iimpediment to offering total co-operation. It would be more difficult if the client was not prepared to say what material was to be handled, as this generally affects the specification. Information about the space available, how the material is offered to the equipment and the condition in which it is to be discharged are highly relevant in many cases, otherwise commercial features of the use of the material is normally irrelevant.
I have not found reluctance to propose offers for equipment reasonably specified and would strongly question why a supplier would seek irrelevant information on the duty. ■
Dear Waiwhite,
Dear Waiwhite,
I will provide this. We manfuacture and provide technical consultation in size reduction and particle size distribution control, preliminary proposals, laboratory testing and scale-up to the final engineering proposal. Please visit our website at www.cms-can.com.
Please contact me at any of the means below. I prefer to obtain your email contact information in order to provide a preliminary proposal direct to you. Thanks.
■
Information from Equipment Suppliers
Why is it so difficult to get information from equipment suppliers?
G'day,
Online communications was supposed to be the tool by which we could all benefit, only it has become almost impossible to obtain information from equipment suppliers.
I am working for a client who wants to introduce a new process line that is commercially sensitive. Essentially, I have been told that I cannot disclose what it is that we are trying to do as if opposition companes became aware of it, they could "cut our legs off" and steal a considerable advantage. At this stage it is just a budget proposal that needs to be prepared so that head office can decide whether to allocate funds or not.
I have tried to contact companies, but they all want project details.
I know what material we are using, and what the key throughput is, but this is not enough. They want to know all the detail including a full process flow. I can't just get a budget price for say a mill (ACM or hammermill) that will have a throughput of 100 - 150 kg/h of essentially milled clay, giving a size reduction to 15 - 20 micron. The same for a ribbon blender that has a blending capacity of 1 tonne (around 180 kg/m^3) with some margin so that the ribbons break through the surface at the top.
Now the equipment suppliers will say "Yes, we can supply something like that", but there it ends. I can't get a model number or an outline installation drawing so that support frames or other interfaces can be set out.
Once the size reduction system has been "selected", this then tells us what the air flow requirements are so we can select the dust collector. Unfortunately, again we come up against the same issues. The circulating fan is probably the only one where we can get this information, but then it's back to the same issues when it comes to the heat exchanger and water chiller.
Going back a few years, I could contact a supplier and all this information was freely available.
Why has the information age made it so much more difficult to actually get information? ■