Bringing Swagelok Catalogs and Technical Information To Your Desktop

The Electronic Desktop Technical Reference (eDTR™) was born here at Swagelok Northern California

Readers who have worked with fluid system components for more than a few years might remember having no choice but to wade through page after page of printed parts catalogs. It was a great breakthrough when Swagelok was able to put catalogs on CD-ROMs. But we knew that technology had given us the opportunity to make life even easier on our customers. That's why we came up with Swagelok's Electronic Desktop Technical Reference software, known to most of us as the eDTR™.

The free eDTR™ software makes sure your desktop always has the freshest version of Swagelok's catalogs. Updates are downloaded to your computer via the Internet through a “one-click” update process – no more waiting for literature deliveries or quarterly CD-ROM revisions. It installs quickly onto your hard drive from a flash drive that's pre-loaded with the eDTR™ software.

Team effort

But how did the eDTR™ come about? While Swagelok Northern California knows plenty about fluid systems, we don't pretend to be software experts. For that specialized knowledge, we turned to John Pataki of Logical Labs in Folsom. He was recommended to us by one of our staff members whom had worked with Pataki and stayed in touch. Pataki's background is not in pure computer science, but rather from engineering jobs that gradually concentrated on task automation.

"John has a unique background that makes him an ideal developer of tools to be used by technical people. He is a degreed engineer with engineering experience and was familiar with Swagelok products," said Rod Fallow, president of Swagelok of Northern California.

When we met John seven years ago, he was working as a consultant at Lockheed Martin helping the engineers maximize their use of engineering software tools like Finite Element Analysis and Computational Fluid Dynamics. He had also started to help them automate complex processes with software that he developed. With that background, he is able to quickly understand what we are trying to accomplish for ourselves and for our customers and in the process make intelligent suggestions that further improve the tools we are developing.

Pataki started talking with us in 2008, and had figured out a working system by 2009. The eDTR™ software was such a big hit with customers, that by 2010 many other Swagelok Sales and Service locations were also using it. The software became so popular that in 2011 Swagelok Company brought the eDTR™ software into the worldwide Swagelok organization.

Pataki has grown Logical Labs over the years into a viable team able handle a variety of projects and solutions. So in the same way that Swagelok Northern California can create custom solutions for our customers, Pataki and his team at Logical Labs created a custom software solution for us.

Great reception

"What the account managers and customers like best about the eDTR™ is the instant access to all the available technical information in an easy to search format," Fallow said. "The eDTR™ has become the go-to tool for fast access to all of Swagelok's technical information."

Customers love the ease with which they can find the solutions they are looking for. Customers also value the speed - no waiting time to download a 5 MB catalog, only to find out that what you were looking for was in a different catalog. The ability to quickly flip from one catalog to another is also valuable.

"Rod is very much on the leading edge of innovative ideas and willing to take the risk and try something new," Pataki said. "I think that keeps him ahead of the curve."

You can stay ahead of the curve to by requesting a free copy of the eDTR™ from our website.

As they say on the late night television infomercials, "But that's not all! There's more!" In an upcoming blog post, we'll introduce you to the next step in making life easier for our customers: Mobile applications.

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