The Web portal
What you need, when you need it

Of the latest Internet offerings, engineering services
are hitting a new high.

BY DIANE TROMMER

hile many have struggled to place a dollar value on information offered online, Mike Schultz, CEO of QuestLink Technology Inc. (Austin, Tex.) pegs it somewhere in the vicinity of $250 billion. Why? That is the amount of annual purchases over which electronic industry design engineers have brand and model control, he said.

Although most of the early online players have tested the business- to-business (B2B) waters with the relatively low-risk trade of excess and spot market goods, QuestLink is among the select few in the electronics space that are betting that the real pot of gold at the end of the B2B rainbow will come not to those who focus on transactions, but to those who facilitate the flow of information and collaboration throughout the design process.

	Mike Schultz, CEO QuestLink Technology Inc.

"We can add the most value and make the greatest contribution to our users at the front end of the process," said Schultz. "It’s all about time-to-market - not price." He estimates that up to 35% of the design process is spent gathering and assimilating information necessary for the design of a new product.

Jon Ekoniak, senior analyst with usbancorp Piper Jaffrey (Minneapolis, Minn.) believes that the opportunities for improving business processes through the use of the Net go far beyond gaining a few margin points on the sale of excess inventory.

"Companies focus on the wrong aspect of electronic commerce," said Ekoniak. "The problem is that the transaction, or how you get paid, is what is viewed as the Holy Grail of electronic commerce - not necessarily solving the problems of the industry."

"Rather than just doing transactions, Web sites need to provide a vehicle for companies to reduce cycle time, remove some of the friction in the supply chain, reduce paper in the supply chain, and eventually, automate entire processes to run entirely from computer to computer," Ekoniak said.

"As the cycle time of products declines, it is extremely important for design engineers to have access to all products that are available. Not just what they are, but specific dimensions," Ekoniak said.

To support the design process, QuestLink aggregates the supply of more than 2,000 manufacturers across three billion dollars worth of available inventory through its franchised distributor partners who also fulfill the site’s demand. QuestLink’s fulfillment partners include Avnet Inc., All American Semiconductor, and Nu Horizons.

Offering free online access to a database of more than 20,000 application notes (which can be searched by using the root part number, part description or product category, as well as company profiles on more than 400 manufacturers), Questlink’s goal is to relieve engineers of the time-consuming, administrative portion of their jobs, so they can focus on bringing new technologies to market.

Other electronics suppliers find that supplying free online information to engineers is a first step toward bringing business to their sites. Continuing its evolution from an off-line broker to an online market maker and process enabler, PartMiner Inc. recently launched its Free Trade Zone (FTZ).

The Electronic Commerce Free Trade Zone provides purchasing tools, product information, and editorial content, free-of-charge to users. The goal of the new FTZ site is to provide users with a set of collaborative tools that can help close the loop between engineering and purchasing, said Bill Barron, chief marketing officer for PartMiner, Manhattan, N.Y.

In addition to its buyers' marketplace, which allows buyers to request and receive quotes, negotiate terms and place orders online with their preferred suppliers, FTZ also features PartMiner Direct, a market maker service offered to users when preferred suppliers are unable to fulfill an order.

FTZ’s new Design Center contains CAPSXpert, a database of component information on more than 12 million parts featuring parametric search and a direct pin-for-pin comparison guide.

PartMiner has also recently entered into a memorandum of understanding with Innoveda Inc. (Marlboro, Mass.) and Electronics Workbench (Toronto, Canada) which will allow engineers using these design tools to load in their bill of materials and buy the parts at the FTZ site, Barron noted.

With the extensive amount of information currently available online to engineers, what many users need is a filter to help them "get some good signal out of the noise," according to Girish Mhatre, CEO for ChipCenter (Manhattan, N.Y.) ChipCenter was formed through the unlikely collaboration between distribution rivals Arrow Electronics Inc. and Avnet Inc., along with Aspect Development, CMP Media, and Pioneer-Standard Electronics Inc.

The ChipCenter "super catalog" of components available through Arrow and Avnet represents more than 900 electronic component manufacturers. The Web-based company also recently launched its new Web site www.My.ChipCenter.com feature that provides personalized content and e-commerce to users.

My.ChipCenter.com aggregates and customizes general news and lifestyle content from InfoSpace, a global Internet Information infrastructure service company providing real-time financial news and information from NewsAlert. The company also manages customer relationships and offers secure e-commerce services supported by Art Technology Group, Inc. (Cambridge, Mass).

My.ChipCenter.com will eventually encompass other functions related to the cataloging, tracking and purchasing of electronic components, and collaboration tools for teams of engineers and purchasing professionals.

One of the newest players in the field is SpinCircuit. Working with a variety of players throughout the supply chain including Hewlett Packard, Cadence Design Systems, Flextronics International, Avnet Inc., All American Semiconductor, ON Semiconductor and Innoveda, SpinCircuit’s sole purpose is to provide engineers with the information they need to evaluate, select and qualify components and generate a bill of materials, said Kent Shimasaki, vice president of marketing and strategies for the San Jose based company.

The site does not currently, nor does it have future plans to, offer commerce services. "We are not in the commerce business," said Shimasaki. The company’s revenue model will be based on selling subscriptions to premium-level information services.

"We see a tremendous opportunity to link the right information to the right members of the team - at the right time - from design to manufacturing," said SpinCircuit CEO Pat Guerra. "The SpinCircuit gateway will enable OEMs to realize improved time-to-market and greater productivity by having the ability to make design decisions when they matter most-at the beginning of the design process."

The cornerstone of the SpinCircuit Web site is the Activeparts component library that was originally developed by Cadence. Activeparts links design-component information to manufacturers' databases. Using Activeparts, designers can find components, perform what-if analyses and make cost trade-off decisions at the conceptual phase of design.

In addition, SpinCircuit seeks to provide more than just access to component databases. "There is a lot of information that is in digital form," said Shimasaki, who noted that while there is a tremendous amount of information available to engineers in digital form, a lot cannot be digitized, such as field application engineer (FAE) support.

"We will offer designers the ability to get online, share design tools, and collaborate with a knowledgeable FAE to ask questions and validate functions," Shimasaki said. "Not everything is available in a database. Those are the services we will add to the system to virtually access and enable online collaboration."

Franchised distributors, like Pioneer-Standard Electronics Inc., are also major players in the Web game. Pioneer’s Web strategy is to enable users to not just learn, find, and buy online, but to be supported electronically.

To facilitate users online experience, Pioneer launched its Web site www.mypioneer.com, which enables users to personalize their view of the Pioneer site depending upon their job function. Each view includes a series of tabs, which model the current workflow and information that is relevant to the flow for that particular job. For example, engineers can search for datasheets, application notes and technical information, as well as features and benefits of each product. In addition, engineers can contract pricing, work using their own internal part numbers, view bonded and available-to-sell inventory, and receive automatic ship notifications.

	Tom Pitera, President Pioneer-Standard’s Electronics Division

The site’s orientation to engineering content reinforces Pioneer’s demand creation strategy, said Tom Pitera, president of Pioneer-Standard’s Electronics division (Cleveland, Ohio).

Catalog houses are also participating in e-commerce trade. Considered to have one of the best distributor Websites, DigiKey Corp.’s site provides a complete downloadable catalog, real-time status, up to the minute pricing, and online order entry and tracking.

Recognizing that a design win is the first step toward capturing a hefty volume production order, some manufacturers are stepping up their online efforts to support the engineering community. For example, National Semiconductor Corp. offers engineers the ability to search for products and analyze designs online at its Web site www.power.national.com.

If a designer is looking for a power supply design, for example, he can search the National Web site by specifying his system parameters. The search engine will return a list of the devices that meet those requirements and architectures, and that potentially address those applications, explained Phil Gibson, vice president of Web business for National Semiconductor (Sunnyvale, Calif).

After receiving a cost-benefit analysis, the engineer may select a product and launch into a simulation where a schematic of the system is presented. The system can be exercised based on performance criteria. Once satisfied with the design, the engineer has a functional representation and a bill of materials for the design.

Gibson reports that a typical design engineer will simulate and exercise a design between seven to twelve times based on different component configurations. With each simulation (which takes between 5 and 45 seconds), the engineer may spend an hour or two working online with National's Web design service.

In comparison, an engineer working off-line will have to find all the component models, create a simulation environment, as well as take several other steps, Gibson said. "This service could easily shave three to four weeks off the design cycle," he said.

The ability to enable collaboration is what, at the end of the day, will differentiate the various Web offerings available to business users, whether these companies are Web-based, brick or mortar, or are distributors, manufacturers or brokers.

Those eMarketplaces that will succeed will utilize the eMarketplace platform as a mechanism to provide solutions that make industry processes more efficient, according to Todd C. Weller, analyst with Legg Mason Inc. (Baltimore, Md).

"Successful eMarketplaces will realize that a transaction is typically the last stage of B2B interaction and that it is imperative to provide solutions to industry interactions that occur at the stages preceding the transaction," Weller said.

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