Editor’s Pick: Mobile App Platform Supports Component Manufacturers

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

When the iPad and Android were young, the family super geek and I wondered—while wolfing down Easter pie—how long it would take for the technology to be ready for prime time work as opposed to great platforms for accessing the web, reading magazines, and doing crossword puzzles. Having faith in technology and technologists, we knew it was just a matter of time until tablets and mobile devices in general insinuated themselves into engineering work. Recently, we’ve seen some pretty interesting stuff from the likes of National Instruments, Autodesk, and SolidWorks. But today’s Editor’s Pick of the Week might just be the one that gets your boss to equip you with a brand new Android or iPad.

CADENAS PARTsolutions, the developer of 3D part catalog management and sales configuration tools, has launched a mobile app platform for industrial component manufacturers. They say it’s the first such product. I just know that it’s first rate interesting.

The basic idea of the mobile app platform is to make a user-friendly Android or iPad/iPad Mini app out of your product catalog. Your app can offer 3D CAD models, data sheets, company and product news and whatever other data you want. Your app can also have product configuration functionalities, 3D interactive viewing, text search, e-mail sharing of product models, downloads, social networking, a live support option, and distributor contact details integrated with Google Maps. But that isn’t the half of it.

See, you can do two things with this technology, and for the life of me I cannot decide which I find more intriguing. So, let’s start alphabetically. End users. Your customers. They download your app from the App Store or Android Market. Sitting at Starbucks, they fire up your app, find a component, and e-mail the model and its data sheets to themselves or a designer. The model gets plunked into an assembly, and they have costing and sourcing details to go into a BOM.

Although your vice president of sales is hyperventilating by now, we move on to you sales engineers. You can take your iPad to a client’s office, pull up a component, reconfigure it to the client’s specs, build a 3D interactive demo of it, and then send the lug you’re dealing with the reconfigured 3D model and PDF data sheets while the two of you dissect the election results. Now, who would not want their team of sales engineers to be able to show off like that?

The potential benefit of the CADENAS PARTsolutions mobile app platform for component manufacturers seems simply unlimited. And that’s why the time has arrived for your boss to equip you with a brand new Android or iOS device.

Go and learn more about CADENAS PARTsolutions mobile app platform from today’s Pick of the Week write-up. Make sure to hit the link and watch the video. If you need to teach yourself more about how electronic part catalogs behave on iOS and Android devices, download the app linked at the end. Once installed, you can access more than 300 manufacturer catalogs.

Thanks,  Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today’s pick of the week write-up.

This is sponsored content. Click here to see how it works.