Chad, you bring up a great point, thanks for doing so. The “phantom stock” issue has always driven me crazy as well. It can cost you a lot of valuable time and even make you look silly in front of your customer if the distributor can’t deliver the phantom stock component. Thus the reason I decided to design the “standard parts” sourcing on MFG.com differently than any other system.

As you correctly stated, supplier catalogs are more often than not, loaded with every component under the sun so they can generate inquiries and get your information to add to their prospect database. This is one of the reasons why I decided we would not host catalogs on MFG.com.

I spoke to hundreds of purchasing and engineering people who told me they didn’t want to waste their time digging through suppliers catalogs, it is time consuming, confusing and most of the time they don’t have the parts in stock anyway. They told me what they really wanted was to create an RFQ with their requirements and let the distributors propose what, when and at what price they could deliver a component matching the requirement. In essence the MFG.com buying community told me they want to flip the equation and make the distributor who wants to sell you something do the work.

However, when it comes to standard components the purchasing and sourcing people wanted to source one way and the engineers wanted to source a very different way.

The buyers (purchasing and sourcing professionals) told me they wanted to be able to specify the part they needed by manufacturer / part number and indicate whether equivalents are acceptable. Let that RFQ match up to interested distributors and have them provide a quote and lead-time for the exact component or an equivalent.

The engineers told me they wanted to be able to specify components by attributes and let the distributors do the work of finding components that meet the attributes the engineer needs for his/her design. For example, one engineer said to me “when I’m designing something I may know that I need a roller ball bearing with a .75” OD, a .375” ID, .25” thick, etc. etc., I want to just create an RFQ with my requirements and let the distributors tell we what they can propose. That would save me a ton of time, time that today I spend going from catalog to catalog and after finally finding a component that would work and contacting the distributor do I learn it has an excessively long lead time or some issue, then I have to spend another hour searching …..”

So, I listened intently and gave the MFG.com community whatthey asked for. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, when you source for a standard component on MFG.com, we give you the option of sourcing by manufcturer and part number OR by the attributes of the component being sourced. And it’s been well received with lot’s of RFQ flow and distributors jumping on board quickly. However, it’s not perfect, we are continually working to perfect all the RFQ templates and business rules by listening to the community. As anyone who knows me or has been using MFG.com for a while will tell you, I’m never satisfied with the value we offer our loyal community.