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Positioning Materials

• Compare your materials with the competition, identify potential applications and improvements
  
  
• Present customers with quantitative evidence of your material's competitive advantages in a compelling and engaging manner
  
  
• Make best use of all available materials information to market your products

The problem

Marketing materials of all types - plastics, metals, composites, ceramics - in today's commercial engineering environment is increasingly complex. More grades than ever are available, with better-optimized and tailored properties. Competition between classes of materials is increasing with, for example, engineering plastics replacing metals, or new composites supplanting more traditional materials. You need to match your material to appropriate applications, to identify key areas for improvement, and then to present the advantages of your material against all potential competitors to your customers.

Your materials expertise and past experience is vital in these exercises. But, in many cases, it is no longer enough. You need to continually re-assess the performance of your materials against new competitors and seek new niche applications. You need to ensure that your analyses and recommendations to customers can be captured in a 'rational' selection process - both in order to convince customers and to ensure that you do not lose this knowledge if an expert retires or leaves. And you need a clear and compelling presentation of this process for your customers.

Granta's solution

Granta can help. First, our GRANTA MI system is designed to capture all of your materials information - for example, from testing, QA, and production - in a single materials database. Granta's materials reference data provides comprehensive engineering, economic, and environmental data about thousands of engineering materials. Together, these mean that you can assemble and apply the entire range of available materials data in analyzing your materials performance and proving it to customers. In particular, it means that existing investments in materials testing and materials science can be leveraged more effectively in sales and marketing.

The tool that helps you to apply this data is the CES Selector, a PC-based software application that enables rational selection of materials. CES Selector is based on the methods developed by Granta's founder Professor Mike Ashby, a world-renowned authority in materials engineering, at Cambridge University. A key feature is materials selection (or 'Ashby') charts. These plot two materials properties against each other or plot combinations of properties, known as performance indices, that represent the optimal performance for a particular engineering application. The ability to create charts showing any property or index, including engineering, economic, and environmental properties, provides a quantitative and highly visual way to analyze the relative performance of materials and to present this information to customers. Data and graphics can be easily pasted to productivity applications such as Excel and Powerpoint to support presentations.

A simple materials selection chart

Related example solutions

• Materials decision support for enterprise
  
  
• Routine management of materials test data
  

Further information

CES Selector for rational selection of materials and processes

A more detailed discussion of the Ashby selection methodology

Granta's materials reference data

GRANTA MI for management of in-house data

Specific data for:

• Elastomers - rubbers and TPEs
  
  
• Transparent plastics
  
  
• Stainless alloys
  
  
• Design for low carbon footprint and energy efficiency