Case Study: Material and Product Intelligence for the Adhesives and Sealants Industry
Access to comprehensive materials data can help adhesive and sealant manufacturers optimize product design and development choices.
To excel, all manufacturing organizations (including those that produce or use adhesives, sealants, and coatings) need an intimate understanding of their products. Products are made out of materials. Materials are shaped, joined, and finished using multiple processes. These are obvious statements, and they point in an equally obvious way to the conclusion that organizations must treat knowledge of their materials and processes as a critical corporate asset.
The trouble is that very often, they don’t. According to Smithers Rapra, around 70% of plastic products fail prematurely, and 45% of these failures are due to poor material selection or substitution. In other words, the manufacturer did not make the best available material choice. Often this comes down to not making best use of the available materials information. Perhaps this should not be a surprise, since Cambridge University spinoff Granta Design found in a recent survey that engineering enterprises typically use 50% of the data generated from materials testing only once before discarding it.