e-catalogues becoming business critical

Electronic catalogues are being used by design and purchasing professionals in a staggering 55% of UK companies, with a further 4% already building the capability in as part of their e-procurement project programmes. This is the chief surprise finding of a survey conducted by market researcher Benchmark among 150 design and purchasing departments of both small and large engineering OEMs for our sister engineering title Eureka. The study suggests that such systems are in much greater current use than many believe. Even allowing that the catalogues many refer to will be basic text plus analytical data for their key, regularly used components from preferred suppliers, rather than content-rich, fully classified, database-driven electronic catalogues, the writing is on the wall. Given that it also finds 54% of respondents indicating that suppliers unable to provide electronic data are less likely to be used in the longer term – and 83% saying such data provision will become increasingly important when evaluating new suppliers – if they haven’t already, manufacturers must now take this seriously. Proper electronic catalogues with well managed content, attribute searching and the rest against meaningful and standardised engineering schema are now becoming critical. And if you want to maintain or obtain preferred supplier status when OEMs go through major design changes, you better be capable – otherwise you will be marginalised. Stuart Holness, new managing director of electronic catalogue developer Reqio, reckons companies already providing rich content catalogues is probably around 20%, while those offering the latest functionality (with connection to upcoming XML standards) is probably nearer 5%. He advises manufacturers that have already been around the circuit and found bespoke point solutions the only answer to look again. “They’ll find more sophisticated, more pragmatic out-of-the-box functionality,” he insists. And he says that with technology now “a buyer’s market”, costs for a system could be around £10—15,000, or hosted for about £1,000 per month.