subject: Beware of Mister No Problem With Magnetic Workholding and Material Handling [print this page] Beware of Mister No Problem With Magnetic Workholding and Material Handling
The vast majority of the manufacturing and steel service industries have never incorporated permanent magnetic workholding and material handling technology into their production process; it is their right to be skeptical.
Most important, they need qualified answers to alleviate or confirm their concerns. The problem for the inquirer is where to find those answers in the first place. There are just a handful of manufacturers worldwide that can claim an adequate level of technical competence; it is one thing to know about the product it is another to understand how it will behave under varying conditions in the field.
There are very few places where permanent magnetic theory is part of the education curriculum and there are even less places where one can gain application experience that is not at the customer's expense.
It is my contention that the magnet supplier's refusal to provide the customer the expertise they desperately need has been most responsible for stagnating the market's acceptance of the very technology it wants to sell. I would go further by saying that the absence of overall basic understanding makes the prospective user even more vulnerable to dubious selling tactics.
There exists an eagerness to sell product at almost any cost. Free samples are often provided along with the statement "if you don't like it, simply return it". The responsibility for successful implementation is the user's alone.
The negligent supplier fails to appreciate that the customer may be lost forever if the magnet fails to perform. So many times I have called upon excellent prospects only to be greeted with "tried magnets, they don't work!"
I am a firm believer that magnetic chucks and magnetic lifters afford unrivaled benefits to many workholding and handling applications, and that their use will reap huge cost savings for the user, but they also have their limitations. As suppliers, it is critically important that we convey these limitations to the customer. This level of honesty may result some compromise of even no order, but at the very least it should leave the door open for other opportunities in the future.
As for the customer, I can only hope they not only continue to ask tough questions but that they ask them to more than one supplier, I guarantee they will witness a difference in the quality of the answer.
At all costs, every effort should be made to avoid the Salesman that without qualification, answers with "no problem".
