Standardizing Motors for Volume Pricing

What type of products? Exactly what are they being used for?

I do apologize for not responding sooner, had problems with emails. However, I neglected to mention that these are stepper motors used in Optical Spectroscopy equipment.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

There are thousands of motor types ans sizes. We cannot tell you what works for your application without having all the details in hand.

This is a question that you should ask to your design team. They have all the info needed to come up with a valid answer.

In a properly operating company, it should be easier to ask your colleagues than perfect strangers scattered around the world.

I neglected to mention that these are stepper motors used in the manufacture of Optical Spectroscopy equipment. Your are correct my design team should be assisting with this but it's not that easy on my end. Though being a buyer with a technical background, my engineering group may not appreciate this suggestion of standardization which I'm assuming may create a design task that they are not prepared for. However, I think I will have to put on my armor and approach my engineering to help in this dollar saving scheme.

Thanks for your advise!

AJ

My arrogance detection pings loud and clear on this one. Well they're all motors, why can't one motor be used for another motor? This way we can buy in bulk just the one motor type and style, to make more profit. I realize that I'm taking your question to an extreme but hyperbole can make a point. You have no respect for your engineering staff and have posted your query to a group of anonymous engineers and engineer wannabes. Have you no shame. Have you even looked at the selection grid of any of the stepping motor manufacturers that you currently use? They don't make scores of different style motors to baffle designers. They make this many styles of stepping motors because no single motor type can do everything. I expect that you don't even comprehend half of the parameters meaning. Just to name a few pertinent parameters there's running torque, holding torque, rotor inertia, step size, micro-stepping, flange size, EMI pattern, phase wiring pattern, and out gassing. You are making an end run on your engineering staff by asking us to streamline your spectroscopy products. There must be a problem then between you and your engineering staff that you wouldn't ask them to consolidate some of the motor styles used. Being an engineer myself, I suspect you.

I hope that somebody in your company can trace this thread back to you. Your kind of bean counting saves a company pennies at the cost of reputation, reliability and respect. Any of these costs could amount to millions of dollars, if not the corporation itself.

Maybe the engineering staff could write some business software programs that handle your end in the company. The program certainly would be cheaper. The program would only work where it was programmed to work. The program would not on its own lie or embezzle money. Properly written, the program would produce hard copies of all transactions for later auditing.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm deeply offended and will not betray fellow engineers. If you will not ask your staff if and how consolidation of motors can be done, then leave the company. At the very least keep quiet to outside groups. For I will now be skeptical of any new Spectroscopy equipment I must purchase.

I must apologize to you engineers who have taken offence to my question/response. This was not my intension. I thought this was a valid question be it motors or any other type of components. If my question was not electrically practical then I need to be educated by your professional responses and not be tongue lashed or degraded.This is a forum for questions.

Don't be offended by the dry responses that you got. Every experienced engineer knows that even the simplest change or substitution can have drastic impact on a product performances or reliability.

I many of us had to mop up behind a material substitution that has gone wrong. This is why we are frustrated by a purchasing agent that deliberately bypass the engineering group to change the bill of material.

To answer your question again. You may be able to rationalize your purchasing by using less motors but it has to be done through your engineers. They know the details of your products. If they are too busy to help you, ask management to hire another engineer or delay some other project to do this money saving task. If it is worth it, the management should assign the resources.

Prepare your case properly and you might become the company's hero but if you take upon yourself to substitute components, you might end up looking for another job soon.

Good luck.

Hildorin,

Despite my brutal, harsh response to your query, I will gladly answer your and anyone's technical question here. (That is if I can.) I look fondly forward to your enquiries. As a personal mea-culpa, let me highlight what you did that was correct. You sought information before acting. (At least I hope you did. ) My over the top response was intended to get you to realize that well intended independent action can have severe consequences. Ask your engineering staff why motor A cannot do what motor B does. If their answer baffles you, instead of taking up their office time come back here and ask us to explain their answer. The more, non-sensitive information you give us about what you do and don't understand, the clearer to you our explanation can be. I for one, will be glad to help.

i'm very interested in the type of spectroscopy that your company is involved in.

please email me so we can talk mudbilly@yahoo.com