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March 6, 2002
The other day, I met with the buyer at one of the largest
users of castings in the U.S.
I was surprised and grateful that he was willing to devote
half a day to meeting with me and telling me what he likes
and doesn't like about CastingTrade, about competitor sites,
and about foundry websites in general. As I thought about
it later, I realized he made an investment of time because
he thinks the Internet is already having a big impact on casting
procurement, and that impact will only continue to grow.
One of the things we talked about was the new format for
foundry listings that we are developing at Casting Trade.
In one respect, he thinks it's a real step in the right direction.
"The free foundry listings you have on the site now are a
good first step," he said, "but the foundries need to provide
more detail about their capabilities, if they want to be considered
by us as a potential vendor."
I asked if the new format includes the right kind of information.
"It depends on the type of buyer you're addressing," he said.
"For us, the most important things is to see specific descriptions
of the actual molding lines. For other buyers, who may have
less familiarity with casting processes, the key facts are
characteristics of the actual castings achievable. And for
all types of buyers, it's very valuable to have pictures of
typical castings the foundry produces."
"By the way," he said, "let's take a look at some foundry
websites. The difference between the useful ones and the non-useful
ones is like night and day." He surfed through some websites
of well-known foundries as I looked on. He ended with one
that was one of his favorites. "Here . . . (click) . . . a
clear list of the molding and other production lines at their
facility . . . and here . . . (click) . . . a picture of a
group of castings . . . (click) . . . another picture of castings
. . . . That gives me a real clear idea of what these folks
can do."
Does that mean he'll place orders with foundries that have
the "useful" kind of website? "No, not necessarily, but it
does give them a much better shot at being noticed by us,
and becoming part of our vendor qualification process."
"And make no mistake about it," he continued, "new vendor
evaluation is constantly going on. And that's where a site
like CastingTrade is real valuable to us. You have over 6,000
foundries, in every country, in your database. I can search
those by type of casting I need. My alternative is to try
to search on Yahoo, but all that gets me is pages and pages
of hits, 95% of which are of no use to me. With the CastingTrade
database, I can zero right in on the foundries that will fit
my needs."
My conclusion after talking to this buyer is that the Internet
is a tool that's here to stay in the casting industry, and
one that will grow rapidly more important as more and more
companies adopt the "best practices" of the industry leaders,
like the buyer I was talking with.
I'm grateful to this buyer for taking the time & effort to
share his knowledge with me. I hope his views provide some
useful ideas for readers of the CastingLink newsletter.
Best regards,
Joe Scarry
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