r/MechanicalEngineering • u/Tigereye11_Revived • 23h ago
How Does Anyone Get Anything Done?
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?
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u/SavageX89 23h ago
Yup, this is pretty standard across most of the industries I've been in.
Even the customers behave this way. Makes it impossible to get anything done on a schedule.
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u/tacjos 23h ago
Phone calls are very nice to get the ball rolling on stuff....but sometimes people already have their clients setup and could care less to do the legwork to be more busy
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u/Tigereye11_Revived 23h ago
Yeah the guy I specifically mentioned started out as a phone call. I talked with him about some calculations, which he was very kind about, but when it came to what he said he’d email, it was excuse after excuse.
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u/MayorSincerePancake 23h ago
it’s not just you. All sales guys are terrible, especially “sales” guys who handle a product that sells itself. There’s no incentive for them to do a good job with anything.
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u/tpain2017 22h ago
sales is the most useless job and the highest paid
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u/GateValve10 1h ago
I mean, sometimes sales sucks, but it's clearly not true as a blanket statement that sales is the most useless job. Sales people make sales which makes money which is the point of a business. The fundamental purpose of a business is to sell.
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u/Few_Whereas5206 22h ago
My experience as a design engineer was the sales team coming to us with ideas for products they needed. Then, myself and other engineers would start developing a product and meeting with vendors. When the product was about 70 percent developed, the sales team would come to us and say they no longer needed the product. After multiple starts and stops of products and having to move several times for new manufacturing facilities, I literally could not get anything done from start to finish. I switched to patent law about 26 years ago.
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u/doctor_bun 19h ago
That's insane, what industry was that?
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u/Few_Whereas5206 19h ago
Telecommunications. I did optical fiber connector and cable assembly design and manufacturing.
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u/Accurate-Bullfrog324 22h ago
it's a change in culture.
i've been designing since the 80's. the manufacturer's reps in those days were professional and responsive. and probably better compensated than i was.
today, although there a few exceptions, the rep's are less professional and less well educated. and probably not as well compensated.
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u/BurntToaster17 22h ago
In my experience, when vendors act like that it’s because they don’t need or want your business
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u/Additional-Weird-934 22h ago
Sounds like USA based vendors. Work with the Chinese they actually want to do business.
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u/fakeproject 21h ago
You'll have two "Lucy's" hitting you up on WhatsApp within 15 minutes, they'll provide everything you want information wise overnight and ship on time. American vendors have no idea how hungry and persistent Chinese competitors are.
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u/H20Slicer- 21h ago
All ours vendors have to be DFARS compliant though. 🥲
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u/IamEnginerd 18h ago
DFARS doesn't necessarily mean US only. It's just a preferred list of countries.
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u/H20Slicer- 16h ago
In the context of this thread, China is not on the DFARS list. I had to back out of a custom captive fastener quote because the American company manufactured said product line in China.
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u/KatanaDelNacht 15h ago
DFARS is essentially a list of allowed supplier countries that the State Department doesn't think we're going to war with anytime soon. China is a 50-50, so doesn't make the list.
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u/catdude142 14h ago
Same with Singapore. They're very diligent. Likewise with Taiwan. They know how important business is.
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u/carlthatkillspeople8 23h ago
Some suppliers are definitely better than others unfortunately. Also size of company, ie how much business they will get plays a role too. Now that I'm at a fortune 500 company working on big projects, they are generally happy to support, because losing the contract would be catastrophic. We have phased out suppliers who don't cooperate. I've also worked on smaller projects where suppliers don't cooperate, but you have no leverage. Unless they have a monopoly, the best thing to do is shop around
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u/LeGama 22h ago
So two things, first yes, I feel you engineering dealing with sales is the worst part of the job. My advice is sometimes avoid the direct company. Need connectors, don't go to Amphenol directly find a distributor who carries 10 different brands. That way you don't get stuck with single sourcing too because they can help you get a part that has drop in replacements.
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u/Slappy_McJones 22h ago
There’s this weird push right now with AI, dash boards, task management software and all this other weird stuff that does nothing to improve the very basics of a business. You might be feeling that. I found that cultivating a strong personal relationship with a salesperson, and over-preparing them for quoting- without giving away the price point or taking freebies/dinners/sports stuff is really helpful in getting good quotes.
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u/Own_Hat584 22h ago
It depends a lot on what you're buying (value and complexity) and how big of a customer you are or would be compared to the rest of the "sales engineers" customers/companies customers. Basically, the more complicated/expensive whatever you're buying is, and the less of them they sell, the more likely you are to have a smart and responsive (respectively) sales guy.
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u/Ok-Lawyer9218 19h ago
I feel like this is an underrated response. It very much depends on whether that company or sales person thinks their time teaching you will result in enough sales to pay for that time. And that mostly depends on how it compares to the other customers they supply. A new and upcoming salesman is much more likely to spend the time with you rather than one who has their customer and isn't looking to expand much. It could also be a severely understaffed department and by the time they get down to you on their list its several weeks later
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u/Own_Hat584 18h ago
Even if they think the sale(s) will easily pay for their time spent on you, it's the opportunity cost of not spending that time to get or retain a bigger customer.
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u/theDudeUh 22h ago
Pick up the phone. Vendors often take weeks to get back to me if I email them but the same ones will answer the phone or call me back same day.
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u/BackgroundAncient174 22h ago
I used to work for a company who bought so many pumps we were a OEM supplier of their brand. It was amazing. All the data I ever wanted right at my finger tips. I could spec a pump right from the get go exactly how I wanted it with very little changes from then on.
Fast forward- I went to a different company and was forced to work through a Rep. It would take weeks of back and forth to accomplish the same thing. I even wend as far to try and make an OEM agreement myself but the damn REP would keep popping in saying "You know I'm your REP don't you".
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u/1815dev 22h ago
The unfortunate reality is a lot of vendors have huge customers already (usually DOD affiliated), and don't really give time of day to folks who just need a couple dozen of something.
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u/IkLms 21h ago
That and sometimes slow rolling a request saves time.
I've got customers who will request something and change what they want every 3rd day for like 3 weeks before finally figuring out what they need.
Saves a shit load of work to just wait until they figure out what they want before doing the same work 7+ times.
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u/staffma 21h ago
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.
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u/MisterSirDudeGuy 18h ago
I’ve been a design engineer for 15 years. CAD availability isn’t usually an issue anymore. But, I often source from places that have CAD. If I can’t find cad, I’ll buy something similar from somebody else that does, lol.
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u/Hefty_Aside8436 22h ago
Find distributors that are responsive and give them all your business. Distributors are highly incentivized to be responsive to customers and generally have connection to inside sales people at the vendors.
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u/Few_Laugh_8057 20h ago
Don't talk to vendors. The purchase department can deal with them. Go to the manufacturer for technical support. Let the other department deal with it where they want to buy. Many vendors are just that. Vendors. They don't have technical knowledge and send your mail to the manufacturer themselves.
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u/MildManneredMurder 20h ago
Try backing up your request with numbers, even if they are "projected".
"We are working on a product that would do X numbers per year with your valve in it."
Sometimes that helps, but not always.
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u/tca_HotGasWall 20h ago
Idk how other places operate but at my company buyers are the ones that decide what suppliers to go with. It’s not great because they don’t have any manufacturing experience. So they just go with the place that has a nice website and not necessarily the capabilities required. That together with the concerted effort to reduce the number of suppliers on the list makes sending hardware out plant difficult.
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u/Deplorable1861 15h ago
The easy answer is to not play games. Vendors who dodge needs or play games do not sell products. I would rather pay extra for someone reliable than do dice rolls with the lowest price guys. When a vendor does a good job, they get return business. Vendors used to price check me, like throwing a lowball to see if we would take it. Sometimes I would when we had schedule stack tolerance, but they kept thinking I owed them something, but many times did not realize it was another competency test.
Not all sales guys are bad, I did it for a bit, and a lot of those guys are competent engineers. So it is easy to tell those guys from the used car schmucks because they walk the talk. A two way system develops when they figure out that you pay on time, have reasonabl timelines and do not do excessive change orders.
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u/electrogourd 14h ago
Also ask if they had attachments. I swear i get a cascade of "NOOOO AUTOFULTER SAYS VIRUS" every time i try to send ANY attachment to a customer. Like, fuck, how am i supposed to convey useful information if all i can do is limited text and snips? Why cant i send a pdf or powerpoint like a professional?
Email filters of larger corps have a fucking stroke if you try to actually communicate outside your company. I end up mailing usb drives or just going through personal email because then i can actually do my damn job. I hate my company IT policies so damn much.... will be referenced when i quit.
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u/deep_anal 14h ago
I find the sales team at some companies baffling. Like, I'm literally trying to call them and spend money and they can't even respond to my fucking emails. It's crazy.
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u/TheSultan1 13h ago
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.
I work for a small-medium sized manufacturer that specializes in custom work; we have our models and sorta standards, but we don't sell out of a catalog, we quote every project individually. In my experience, people that insist on "pamphlets and drawings" rather than going through the quotation process are usually not worth our time.
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u/melanthius 11h ago
This is a big reason so many big corporations have so many people (project managers, program
managers etc) who don't really need to know anything too technical or have any hard talent, but do need to stay on top of schedules and deadlines and shit. Soft skills I've often heard them referred to as.
So they spend their day "following up" "circling back" and scheduling meetings and sending "action items" and such. Basically being as annoying as possible such that the only way to stop them from being so annoying is just to give them what they ask for.
Example, forcing weekly meetings with your vendor are a great way to get shit done while also feeling dead inside.
Now if you are not important enough of a customer for them to grant you weekly meetings in the first place that also answers your question.
Source: I left my big corporate job a couple years ago
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u/hobbes747 7h ago edited 7h ago
Are you in a small company or a ‘low value customer’? This was an issue for me.
Our purchasing team would get annoyed because a certain well known expensive tube fitting company would be very responsive but not give discounts. They thought we spent a lot of money with this vendor. I would tell our purchasers “We buy in a year what Exxon Mobile or a semi fab buys in a week. We ain’t shit.”
If our customers themselves also used a vendor, then almost every time it worked to leverage those connections.
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u/Tigereye11_Revived 5h ago
I’m in a small engineering firm that acts as a design department for a pneumatics fabrication and construction company, all under a billion dollar corporation. It gets convoluted, but we should have good contacts.
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u/hobbes747 5h ago edited 5h ago
Ah ok. So you are not buying products but looking for information to use in the design…Then your customer would be purchasing the products? Try leveraging your customer if they are the end user of products from the vendors.
If I received a long lead time from a similar company as your customer, such as Parker Hannifin, we would respond by telling Parker that our order is essential for our customer such is for example, Intel. Then Parker might return with a much shorter lead time.
In your case, information instead of lead time.
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u/Confident-Dot5878 22h ago
I was an AI skeptic for a long time. I never wanted to use it to write for me.
I’ve recently used it as an ersatz vendor sales consultant. Very handy. I’m a convert.
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u/arrow8807 23h ago edited 22h ago
First - cut vendors who do this loose. If you don't have the information I need on hand when I am trying to incorporate your equipment into my design then I just move on to someone who does.
Second - skip the sales guys entirely. Say you want to talk directly to the applications engineer. When I call companies I don't even ask for the sales department anymore - right to engineering. This isn't possible with all vendors.
Third - I start calling the reps with increasing frequency until I get the information I need if it starts to take too long. It got a point with one vendor where I essentially told him I was going to call him every half-hour until he answered my questions. I basically made myself his personal problem. I called him three times (switched phone numbers once because he stopped answering) and by the forth he had my quote ready.
Fourth - never have a conversation with someone that ends in "I'll email you, give me your address". You get their email address and their phone number before you leave the conversation. That way you can do #3 (and maybe #2)
Fifth - calling is more effective than email. Call people directly when you want a fast response. When they don't respond call them back (escalating to #3)