Martti Huoli wrote
.....
Through direct Internet ordering (order configurators)
you can get your combination with in reasonable time with out waiting half
a year.
This is what we customers could use in rapid prototyping. An internet
access where we could give an envelope and some properties of our part and
get an instant quote on the rapid prototype, price and most importantly
delivery date.
..........
This has happened already in the RP world. www.materialise.be offers the
online quoting under their next day service system. After some tweeking and
software installation I managed to get my parts quoted.online. They offer
two choices of material "FLEX" and "RIGID". These choises were good enough
for me. I failed in another options field. The list of possible countries
the customers could be residing in is also fixed and limited. They do list
Viet Nam but not my country, Estonia. So in order to get a quotation I had
to lie that I am in Finland (a mere 100 km away). The quotes were OK, I
would have ordered the parts, put I never managed to get a reply from
Materialise regarding the actual delivery address in a country not listed in
their system.
The morale: With online quotation/ordering systems you are at the mercy of
the automatic system behind it, and if you are not confirming to standards
(unique, original, outside the box, live in the wrong place, are a smoker,
member of minority, have bad breath, your feet stink) you get discriminated
and you are not needed.
Priit Kull
tre@kodu.ee
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
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