Published

Print and Web Sourcing at Your Fingertips

Businesses must buy things. It’s a necessary part of doing business.

Share

Welcome to the 2015 Production Machining Buyer’s Guide. As the name implies, we have put this issue together to help guide companies as they search to make the best, most informed business purchasing decisions during 2015.

Businesses must buy things. It’s a necessary part of doing business. Some purchases are relatively routine and can be handled, well, routinely. Other purchases, such as capital equipment and productivity enhancing technologies require a bit more research. But often, many companies don’t know what they don’t know.

Featured Content

For important purchasing decisions, companies need to spread as wide a research net as possible to find the right supplier to work with. That’s where a guide such as the one you’re holding is valuable. Moreover, the shelf life for this issue means that it’s available to you throughout the year—whenever you’re ready to research a purchase. But the Guide itself is only a first step in the purchasing research process. 

This Buyer’s Guide, coupled with the power of its online component, the PM online Suppliers Directory, provide researchers with a powerful one-two combination method of finding that best fit supplier and most importantly, the right product or service for your business’s needs. In today’s multi-media world, accessing the best tools available is key to reaching the best purchasing decision.

Together, the Buyer’s Guide and online Suppliers Directory represent comprehensive and accurate tools for manufacturers in the precision machined parts industry to find products and services key to their continued competitive operation. Together, print and the Web work to help businesses create a list of potential suppliers, research the list and then narrow it to the most likely candidates to supply what is needed.

To create this Guide, we send out an extensive survey to suppliers that are relevant to our reader’s business. We know who they are, and in turn, they provide us with the product and services categories that show you who makes what. In effect, we edit the content of the guide to fit you. For anyone who has tried to use the Internet, through Google or other universal search engines, the value of having such a search narrowed by editors who understand your business needs becomes obvious.

So that’s the start of the purchasing process as it exists in 2015. Step one is familiar to most. Use the guide and its organized categories to identify the companies that can provide what you are looking for. These categories are comprehensive, yet not off target for precision machined parts manufacturers.

The contact information is comprised of companies many of you may already know, but it also contains companies you may not be familiar with. There is a tendency to go with those you know, but including some you don’t know in the research may be worth checking out as well.

Taking that list of possible candidates, and checking them out using the online Suppliers Directory can reveal many things about who they are and what they supply. These templates are consistent and enable a reasonable side-by-side comparison among various suppliers.

To move forward in the process, hot links to the company’s website are part of the Directory listing. It’s a much more streamlined process to access who, what and where products and services can be accessed without leaving your desk. It’s also fast because the Buyer’s Guide and online Supplier Directory have undergone an extensive culling process to eliminate wasted time from sorting through players not relevant to what you’re looking for.   

In business today, it’s never been more important to be as efficient in spending as possible. It’s equally important to get the right products and services, which will perform as promised, at the best price. The use of the Buyer’s Guide and online Directory, in tandem, can be used as a tool that can help you make your necessary purchases more efficiently.

And what many companies find a really cool benefit of using these research tools together is that the process of list creation, supplier research, and final candidate selection can be accomplished anonymously. Suppliers don’t know your company is in the market for a product or service until you choose to tell them. No salesman will call you until you are ready to be called.

When you’re ready to buy, try it. The Buyer’s Guide and PM online Suppliers Directory are ready when you are.