Quicker engineering result; Laying the foundation for webbased engineering tooling

How sweet it would be to be able to download bits of productinfo from different vendors, connect them together as you see fit, and show the resulting behaviour of the products in your application instantaniously. For example a drivetrain, you connect info of a leadscrew from vendor A to a reduction of vendor B and lineair guide from vendor C plus electric motor from vendor D. Automatically the amount of friction of all those elements are determined right away and also is checked if the acceleration and maximum velocity are no problem for the motor. Print the results and order the parts, 15 minutes spent....

This would save a tremendous effort in calculations, and gathering of information. The problem is that a calculation model is needed that is not provided by the vendors themselves. Also it is necessary that is that the information provided by the vendors need to fit the correct format to be able to fit in the calculation model. Info from different vendors lack unifomity so that is another problem to overcome.
If those obstacles out of the way you have finished your working day and the next day you can finally get the results of your effort.
So it is save to say that if vendors provide the calculation models and the correct data it would dramatically speed up your time-to-market and promote product transparancy.

This not only benefits the engineer and the company he (engineering is still dominantly male) is working for, but also the vendor. Quicker time-to-market is quicker sales, also more sales if the competition does not offer the same time-benefit, and even higher sales! According to a study of N. Granados (TRANSPARENCY STRATEGY IN INTERNET-BASED SELLING, 2003) an increase in product transparency is associated with a decrease in the costs of information search and, consequently, it also increases consumers’ willingness-to-pay. How true for the engineering effort as described above. The study by Granados does not focus specifically on engineering products like motors or drive-elements, but that is the place where a lot of time can be saved. Also study from Bakos (1997) consideres the time saved a consumer surplus, or in other words added value in the pocket of the customers.

So we can conclude it aids both product vendor and the engineer who uses the products.
So how should we do it?

All engineering departments have some people that build models and re-use them in a similar situation. All those models have a limited use, and an even a more limited amount of users. They are rarely documented so the use for 'other' people, let alone vendors, is too limited.

The initiative to create and distribute such models has to come from the vendors themselves, or from a shared (open source like) foundation that promotes this initiative, and has backing from the industry. The foundation has to set standards so companies can share them, and consequently make it possible that the models of the different vendors can 'talk' to eachother.
This would also open up the possibility of a lot of commercial activiteits.

First is the time to tell the vendors the good news. They can participate in a new venture which will increase their profit, and improve customer-satisfaction. Win-Win.

Secondly to create the foundation. What kind of people we need? At least some enthousiastic professors from faculties of Mechanics and Electronics who have the people to create the models and set the standards (while we are at it, it needs to be multi-disciplined) and some big companies who see the light (aka dollar-signs). Also marketing brain-power (university) is necessary to be able to think of ways to exploit this idea to the fullest, and at the same time allow the companies to plan for a decent ROI from this venture while allowing the hard-core academics enough opportunity to make something beautifull.

Well, I'm game for it. It is all dependant on the industry. I have not seen anything like this idea yet. I think that is because nobody thought about it yet, but maybe there have been some attempts that failed. If so it is interesting to know why.

So much for my thoughts. I am gonna sleep over it a few days (this is fresh from the mind) to let it sink in and maybe I'll post later some ideas of the goals and methods of the foundation or that I have a real good reason to abandon this idea.
Cheers.