Support turns poll upside down
03 December 2007
You are going to buy a machine, a component placement machine for the sake of argument, but you don’t know where to start. In your mind you have an idea of what you want it to do, how much you want to pay for it and so on, but what is going to be the single most important consideration when selecting your machine?
Well the best first place to start I would suggest would be our ShortList so that you can get a good idea about what equipment is out there. If you haven’t had a look through this feature of the web site then I would encourage you to do so – you might be surprised at the amount of information in there. But the purpose of this column is not to talk about our ShortList, it is about what makes people buy a particular machine.
Our online poll (On EMTWorldWide’s Home page) showed that machine performance was top with 35%, price came next on 26%, followed by support on 23% and reliability was back in fourth on 17%. So that is pretty clear then…isn’t it?
The trouble with an online poll is that while it may be interesting - fun even - it will, in many circumstances, have to over-simplify questions to suit its format. In our question, for example, a clear winner was ‘performance’. But what does this really mean? I would suggest that ‘performance’ was the obvious winner at first glance, but is it really the single factor that makes people buy a particular machine? I don’t think so.
If you wanted to buy a blue shirt then you would go into a clothes shop and go to the rail with blue shirts on it. You then have to make further decisions about style, price and quality. It is the same with performance. The parameters you have selected will be the ones that define your shortlist, they are not the ones that result in the choice of an individual machine.
The same argument could be made for price. Whatever the salesman might tell you about cost per placement, or machine availability, or fast changeovers, nine times out of ten there will be a target cost and an upper limit to what you can spend in terms of capital outlay. While financing deals and a bit of good old fashioned haggling might push back the envelope slightly, you will still have cost restrictions that you can apply to your shortlist and therefore whittle it down further.
Which brings us down to the bottom two factors, support and reliability. And these two, according to my argument, are therefore the most important factors when buying a machine. I know there are many other factors involved – compliance with legacy machines, ease of use, design, brand and many others – which all play a part, but the ‘big two’ according to our poll are not, I believe, the factors that make people select a particular machine.
The ‘big two’ can be put in a spreadsheet to reveal the best contender, but production engineers don’t buy this machine straight away. They want to test it to prove it does what the supplier says, it doesn’t break down or have a lot of downtime, and that the supplier acts like a true partner in getting the best out of that machine for the customer.
It is during the machine evaluations that the decision of what to buy is made and that it is because it reveals the subjective factors that cannot be quantified in a matrix. Price and performance may get a machine on the shortlist, but it is reliability and, more particularly, support that will get the equipment sold.
So what can we learn from this? I think that the clearest message is that I must ask better questions in my poll. So this week I have posed a question about RoHS. Please add your vote online.
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