What Photonics Buyers Really Need: More Than Just Supplier Lists

For their complex task, responsible buyers need a reliable guide which supports them not only by listing suppliers, but from the very beginning: when defining their specific technical requirements. This step is vital:

• First of all, that produces clarity for the buyer: being sure what is really needed. Obviously, this is essential.
• Later, accurate specs are also highly useful in RFQs, for example. Suppliers are keen to receive clear specifications rather than a bunch of vague statements requiring a tedious exchange of questions and answers.

So if good specifications are carefully produced as the first step, the further process gets smoother for everyone involved. Therefore, a reasonable buyer will strongly appreciate powerful support in that work, and suppliers receiving inquiries will be glad if these are more professional and clear.

Good specifications are based on solid technical understanding and on careful work to ensure that all relevant aspects are considered. The RP Photonics platform is extremely helpful in working out such specifications — probably more than any other digital resource in photonics. For external-cavity diode lasers (ECDLs), for example, it explains

• what the term means,
• in which respects these lasers typically excel over other diode lasers,
• what the typical application fields are,
• what variants and technology options exist (e.g. Littrow vs. Littman–Metcalf resonators, and different form factors), and
• what characteristics need to be considered when buying.

For further details, these texts contain links to high-quality encyclopedia articles.

After all that background information, buyers find a form for defining concrete selection criteria — 10 in total in the case of ECDLs. The original list will usually serve as a valuable starting point, but can easily be amended with additional points as needed in specific cases. This is the ideal starting point for sensible RFQs.

The supplier search makes sense once the technical requirements have been clarified. Concrete capabilities and matching criteria can now be checked.

The first step here is to identify reasonable candidates among suppliers, starting from a possibly longer list of suppliers of the specific product category. It is generally preferable to have a comprehensive supplier list — not limited to those who have chosen to advertise in a certain directory. And an expert-curated supplier list is certainly more useful than e.g. a list generated using an all-purpose search engine, which cannot reliably produce a list for a good industry overview.

So for this step, buyers need a supplier directory of high quality, including many suppliers, not limited to advertisers. RP Photonics also offers that on its platform.

Once both the selection criteria and a comprehensive supplier list are there, it comes to carefully checking suppliers against the criteria.

In an ideal world, a digital buyer's guide would now automatically select those suppliers which best match the made specifications. Unfortunately, that is hardly realistic, even if the worked-out specs are clear enough: One requires comprehensive product data, which neither supplier websites nor databases can often provide.

So how to get the required comprehensive product data if it goes beyond public information? Even in times of AI, this still requires humans. Clearly, product managers of suppliers should know their products best, and should thus be in the best position for this specific task. Where the required details go beyond what they can read, they can ask technical colleagues, e.g. developers.

If the buyer presents carefully worked-out specs, that process should work well, ideally answering all questions in one go. He or she will then be fully informed through RFQ responses which products could fit, and what detailed relevant properties those have — often going well beyond what is public.

After having such RFQ responses from one or more suppliers, the buyer should normally have everything for finding the best overall match. Only, the information needs to be collected from different suppliers and put together in an efficient way.

RP Photonics again offers a good solution: Each supplier listing on a product category page is equipped with a checkbox “Evaluate this supplier”. When it is checked, the previously defined selection criteria are displayed there, together with combo boxes for indicating whether a criterion is fulfilled, partially fulfilled, or not fulfilled. The results of this are automatically transferred into a table further below, which you may consider as a supplier evaluation matrix. Finally, the results can be saved to a PDF in order to document the results of the process.