An engineer is laying out an assembly at half past nine at night. He needs a dimensioned drawing and a model file for a component. Your site has a photograph, a paragraph of benefits and a contact form.
He downloads a competitor's file, drops it into the model and moves on. That part is now specified into a product that will be manufactured for eight years.
The checklist
1. Dimensioned drawings
For every product, downloadable, in a standard format. This is the minimum and it is missing from a surprising number of supplier sites.
2. Model files
In the formats engineers actually use, including a neutral format. A model that drops straight into an assembly is worth more than any brochure.
3. Specification sheets
Materials, tolerances, ratings, finishes, operating conditions and standards met. Presented as data rather than as prose.
4. Performance information
Curves, load ratings, flow data or whatever applies. Engineers are checking whether it works in their application and cannot without it.
5. Installation and maintenance information
Fitting requirements, clearances, torque figures and servicing. This decides whether a part is practical as much as whether it fits.
6. Do not gate it
A form between an engineer and a drawing loses the specification. If lead capture matters, capture it through the account for ordering rather than at the point of design.
7. Make it findable by part number
Engineers search a code and expect the technical page. Anything else means they use a distributor's listing or a competitor.
8. Keep revisions clear
Revision number and date on every document, with superseded versions still available. Products in the field were specified against older documentation.
9. Provide it for discontinued products
Engineers maintaining existing equipment need documentation for parts you no longer sell, and removing it when a product is withdrawn strands everybody who bought one.
10. Offer a route for what is not published
Unusual requests, application-specific data and anything requiring the technical team. A clear route prevents an engineer assuming the answer does not exist.
10b. Say what the lead time is
An engineer specifying a part is also planning a build, and a component with a sixteen week lead time changes the design decision entirely. Publishing indicative lead times alongside the technical data means the part that gets specified is one that can actually be obtained when the project reaches production.
11. Publish configurators where they help
Where a product has variants, letting an engineer generate the right drawing for a configuration is far better than forty separate documents.
11b. Make it usable on a phone
Engineers check dimensions standing at a machine with a phone in one hand. A technical page that requires a desktop to read, or serves a drawing only as a file that will not open, is useless at exactly the moment somebody needs it most, and that moment is usually when a decision gets made about what to order.
12. Answer at engineering hours
Design work happens late and at weekends, which is exactly the pattern in technical product questions from engineers at midnight, and a captured request beats a form nobody reads until Monday, which is the distinction in booking widget versus conversational requests.
Getting started
Publish drawings, models and specifications against part numbers without gating them, then answer what is not published at any hour. SpideyChat for manufacturers answers from your published pages and documents, which extends the approach in technical datasheet and certification requests and part number and compatibility questions for industrial suppliers. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about answers on the features page.