The service already has an excellent track record: of the nearly 13,000 requests received since the service was inaugurated in 2002, over 95% have been published, with 40% of requests being published within a week and 50% published within two weeks. The tiny percentage that is not published is due to factors beyond Stardraw's control, such as manufacturers being unable or unwilling to provide the necessary product information (despite the service being entirely free for manufacturers). In addition to their Product Requests, Stardraw Design 7 users have generated over 37,000 User Defined Products, represented by 50,000 custom symbols, since launch of the application in 2011.
Although the service is clearly very efficient in absolute terms, two weeks, or even a week can seem a long time to wait if you are not kept informed of progress.
Consequently, with effect from 8 September 2014, Stardraw has introduced new policies and procedures to ensure that customers know how their requested products are coming along. The first implementation is that customers are notified whenever their requests are published: an email is sent within 24hrs of publication, containing details of all their requests that have been published that day.
Furthermore, the email also contains a breakdown of outstanding requests complete with four different status indicators that will help customers to track and monitor progress of the publication process including whether any action needs to be taken. The status indicators help to predict when publication can be expected.
"There's no doubt that the Product Libraries are a hugely valuable element of Stardraw Design 7.1," remarked Stardraw CEO, Rob Robinson, "but our challenge is that because new products are being introduced all the time, there's a constantly moving target. As a company we're pretty good, but with users in different market segments in more than 80 countries, we can't know everything, all the time, and we can't guess what particular products might be important to any particular systems integrator.
"This is why Product Requests are so important both to us and our users, and why we're committed to constant investment in and improvement of the service. Addition of new products to the libraries is prioritized based on the requests we receive, and in this way their timeliness, pertinence and accuracy is optimized, and that's a real benefit to all of our users."
(Jim Evans)
