Coating Designations

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Lets face it – the thermal spray coatings business is getting more and more competitive every day. In order to succeed, you need to not only find newer applications for thermal spray that can be directed to your shop, but also keep the current thermal spray business that you have from going away elsewhere. I remember a thermal spray sales manager once told me to imagine this process like a shepherd would manage – he said “you can’t let the sheep you got to get away ” This two-fold approach is necessary to keep sales consistent and growing in your thermal spray coatings business model. Assigning thermal spray coating designations is one more step in the right direction in accomplishing this goal.

Many times you will deal with engineers at your potential customers’ plant, that are interested in you providing with a thermal spray coatings solution to their applications problem – lets say it is fretting wear resistance. They are most interested in the end result, namely, getting a thermal spray coating that will increase the resistance to fretting wear. They are really not interested in the means to the end – namely, they do not care whether you chose copper-nickel-indium plasma sprayed or you chose some other material sprayed by the twin-wire-arc thermal spray process, as long as the specifications of dimensional control and metallurgical characteristics are met. Hence it doesn’t do you a whole lot of good to completely describe the means you took to achieve the end result; because now your customer can very easily go to the shop down the street and request that they apply the same means that you did because the customer knows that the end will be met. However, if he simply has a designated thermal spray coating number to go by, this shopping for the lowest price approach is somewhat subdued. The thermal spray shop down the street can still take a fairly good guess at what you did but you do not leave the door of the house open All that your customer has is your company’s thermal spray coating designation for the application solution.

It becomes further more advantageous, if you can have this thermal spray coating designation number specified in your customers’ blue print for the component at hand – for example, processing note number 12 could say, “Send part to Vendor (your company’s name) for Coating Designation: #ABC.” Now, their purchasing agent has no choice but to send out the thermal spray coatings work to you and you end up with a goose that lays a golden egg every time. This technique is not something new. Several companies with sophisticated marketing personnel use this method all the time. The smaller thermal spray companies that have not spent the time in developing the coating designations matrices are the ones that pay the price of potentially losing out on repeat coatings work to the larger thermal spray shops. Of course, this is going to take time effort, but the results will definitely justify the hours of work you put into it.

In a future post, we will go into the details of how to set up a thermal spray coatings designations matrix.