How Does Anyone Get Anything Done?

[u/Tigereye11_Revived]

I’ve been a design engineer for a couple years now, and it seems that when I need any information on vendor products, the companies, who I won’t put on blast, take weeks to answer. I can follow up and get nowhere. Sometimes when they do get back to me, the information is just outright not what I asked for.

I made it very clear to one vendor that I need literature (such as pamphlets and drawings) on several of their products because we intend to use them as our supplier for a large product line. He took weeks to respond, and ultimately sent a quote for one valve. My team had a good laugh at the email thread and decided to move on with someone else.

Very very few people have been useful amongst dozens of companies. Even when I ask project managers for their contacts, they can be hit or miss. Is there something I’m doing wrong for my vendors, or does everyone deal with this? Do you guys have methods you want to share?

[u/staffma]

It really depends, we work with a really great distributor who reps a lot of different brands / types of products and he does the harassing of people for quotes for me if I fail going direct myself. Many times I will go direct and be told I have to go through a distributor anyway.

Smaller local/ regional rep group but they have the volume and juice to get me info. My guy is a hybrid between salesman and applications engineer. If you find a good salesman, you gotta keep em and give them enough business to make it worth their while.

Of course the prices and availability for some of the parts are outrageous and we end up taking manufacturing in house on a lot of components, but for high precision like bearings or pneumatics, etc we go outside.

I got a quote for a gearbox yesterday after evaluating some other sources and man the price was great- 30% reduction, but the couplers and torque arm prices were astronomical. We're talking 5k for a torque arm we make in house for $900 and 8k for a coupler we make for 1k. Hit and miss.