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Sourcing Directories – Thomas Register Electrified
By Mark L. Casey | December 6, 2007
There are times when buyers face a purchasing dilemma and need to quickly find sources for products or services. We all have a personal network of contacts when needs arise, but there are times when our personal network needs to be expanded. What are some of the best resources available for finding vendors for products and services?
Not surprisingly, the Internet has revolutionized the way we access sourcing directory information. Everyone takes advantage of Google, Yahoo!, and the other search engines when searching for sources and vendors. In addition to the search engines taking us directly to lists of companies’ websites, there are some great sourcing directories available.
Let’s explore them and see what their strengths are. Today we start with:
Thomas Register
The old standby has always been the venerable Thomas Register. The value of this compendium of information has been tremendous for many years. These hardbound volumes still grace the shelves of many companies. Thomas Register has “electrified” via their online service ThomasNet. Let’s explore the features of ThomasNet.
Let’s do a sample search on ThomasNet to uncover its features. Let’s say I need a source for adhesive film. This is outside of my current network of vendors and contacts, so I go to ThomasNet for help. The ThomasNet home page gives me several tabs with differing search options. I can search by tabs for:
- Product/Service
- Company Name
- Brand Name
- Industrial Web
- CAD Models
The default tab is the Product/Service tab, so let’s try that first. There is a search box where I type in my search term adhesive film. Next to the search box is a drop down that allows me to select various regions. The default is All States/Provinces. As I drop the list down I see that I can select any US state, Canadian province, and several US possessions, but no international selections outside of the US and Canada. For now we will search for adhesive film suppliers throughout “All States/Provinces.” When I click Search, my screen fills with a multi-page list of results. In fact, there are 10 pages with 25 matches per page. My total number of firms matching adhesive film is 232. That is too many for me to reasonably deal with, so let’s narrow it to my state: Texas. Since Texas is so large geographically, the selection is divided into Texas-North and Texas-South. Austin is right in the middle, sot let’s do our search on both separately.
With the search narrowed to Texas-South, my list shrinks down to five firms. When I change to Texas-North, I get eight firms. These search results are a lot more manageable.
Now that I have some candidates, what can I do? Staying with the Texas-North results, I notice that one firm is Scapa North America – Windsor, CT. The listing indicates that while they are based in CT, they serve North Texas. ThomasNet offers a brief company profile so I can be confident that they do in fact offer adhesive tape. In addition I get a URL so I can link directly to Scapa North America’s website. The “More Info” link gives me a expanded profile, company phone numbers, address, sales figures, etc. Of course, I will usually go directly to the Scapa website once I have the URL. Without leaving ThomasNet, however, I can also click on the Adhesive Film Product Catalog links which will take me to an online catalog of Scapa’s adhesive film offerings.
In the right column of the results screen is a listing of related categories to adhesive film. It may be that I am looking for a specific sub-set of adhesive film that may be listed on the right. The links make it easy to focus in on the exact category I need.
In the event that my search in the Product/Service tab does not provide satisfactory results, I can always try one of the other tabs to search brand name, company name, or the industrial web. In addition, ThomasNet offers a CAD Models tab in case you need an actual drawing of the product you are searching for.
All of the work we have done so far has been done without having to sign up for any special service at ThomasNet, but there are some advantages to creating a free MyThomas account. For example, a MyThomas account allows me to store search results, company information & product details, email multiple companies at once, receive the latest industry news, and create custom news feeds specific to the products that impact my company.
One last thing that is pretty handy is that ThomasNet offers a free Firefox search plug-in for users of the Firefox browser. The drop down plugins are one of the many reasons that a lot of people are switching to Firefox.
Conlcusion
ThomasNet is a valuable resource for finding whatever you are looking to source. It continues the tradition of the Thomas Register, but applies the power of the web and advanced searching techniques to make the data more accessible than ever. As long as your search does not have to go truly international, it is going to be hard to beat ThomasNet.
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