The fastener business may not be as fascinating as flight navigation technology or jet engine evolution, but its products are ubiquitous – and lives depend on their proper function.

Emhart Teknologies manufactures HeliCoil and is a fast-growing division of Black & Decker, the global manufacturer of power tools, hardware and home improvement products. Emhart sells fasteners to the automotive, aerospace, defense, domestic appliances, electronics and telecommunications industries.

Darren Byrne is the director of e-business at Emhart in Shelton, Connecticut. “Fasteners are not the most glamorous items in the world, but I don’t think there’s a car in the world that doesn’t have our fasteners in it. We even fasten the Space Shuttle. The computer you’re working on is probably fastened by us, as is your cellphone.”

Nuts and bolts are commodities, so Emhart's challenge is to differentiate itself from its competitors. The company has long been a leader in mobile and permanent ‘innovation centers’ in Europe and the U.S. that bring fastener solutions to the customer.

“But what we really wanted was to bring our products to customers on a 24/7 basis. Because we have over 10,000 products, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for design engineers to be able to specify which ones they needed on a project.”

Hence the arrival of the Virtual Innovation Center (VIC), an Internet browser-based digital laboratory. VIC was devised in conjunction with SmartSITE software from Hartford, Connecticut-based i-Mark, a vendor that targets industrial product manufacturers that want to reduce their dependence on print catalogs to promote their products and boost business.

SmartSITE is an ASP based primarily on SmartCAT e-catalog technology and a SmartCONNEX facility that connects digital catalogs with buyers from any B2B procurement network, exchange or marketplace.

And with 10,000 SKUs from 10 product categories, finding exactly what you’re looking for is of crucial importance. The VIC search process works in three ways. Using a fastener 'wizard', the buyer is taken step-by-step through the process of finding and applying that product and all the tooling that goes with it.

A parametric-type search allows the engineer to set the parameters of his search, for example by specifying the thickness of the materials to be fastened. “As more parameters are entered, the list of potential fasteners and tools required gets smaller and smaller – but it never gets to zero,” explains Byrne.

Also, a user can search by cross-referencing military, automotive or aerospace specifications. Byrne says “If an engineer knows all the military or industrial specifications of the item to be manufactured, that information will be cross-referenced to one of our products. It even works if you enter all or part of a competitor’s product number!” For more vague searches, such as those triggered by a one-word description, a streaming video clip pops up displaying relevant products.

But one of the most attractive features for time-pressed engineers on project deadline is the configurator that allows the end-user to build his own product on the fly. This can also be downloaded as any two- or three-dimensional drawing in any one of 28 versions of Computer Aided Design.

“So what you get in effect is a digital sample of the product that requires no redrawing. That’s value because he can do this 24/7 – that’s the beauty of the Internet – and he didn’t have to learn about our products separately, because we taught him on site.”

Also, as soon as a user enters the VIC, a network of more than 200 sales applications engineers around the world is immediately alerted via PDAs, wireless application protocol (WAP) phones, home and work email. “We are then able to send back to the end user who their contact is at Emhart. So we’re closing the loop using a CRM facility. For everything you see on the front end, the back end has functionality to match.”

Byrne claims a lot of kudos from customers for being so fast in answering their enquiries and solving problems. As a result, Emhart has produced over 55,000 qualified leads from over 700,000 unique visitors to the site since launch in April 2000.

Del Merenda, CEO of I-MARK, asserts that the biggest problem with e-catalog technology has been that vendors “grossly underestimated” the complexity of the Internet channel. “Precise discovery [of components] is crucial to many industries, whether electronics or luggage manufacturing. It’s the same for business process as well as item selection.”

In the industrial marketplace, Emhart sells many of its products through a nationwide network of 400 distributors. “What we decided to do when we realized that the VIC worked so well was to make it part of our distributor support program. So we offered each of our distributors a private label site with all the VIC features that we call TekLink. This is the beauty of software – you can keep copying it again and again.”

At Emhart, distributors are logistics experts, there to get its products into engineers’ hands, so disintermediation made no sense. “We’ve always embraced our distributors. They were very happy with the VIC. If you have 50,000 leads and 200 sales engineers on the road around the world, you can’t handle that amount of leads.”

The private label sites have also evolved into a profit center for Emhart. “For us to set these up for distributors, we have to charge a small amount of money. TekLink is becoming just like the well-known brands we’ve developed over the last 100 years – only this is software.”

As for cost savings, Byrne points to [but does not quantify] the number of catalogs Emhart has not had to print due to the high rate of orders received online. “If you’re computer-literate, you know how to specify a HeliCoil screw thread insert and everything about it. That’s the beauty of this solution and the Virtual Innovation Center.”