Partfox, billing itself as AI-Powered CNC Matching, Locally or Globally, is an offering from a Zurich-based tech company that was created to solve the dual problems of

• allowing a buyer to find CNC (Computer Numerical Control) factories that can precisely meet the buyer’s need for a custom manufactured part, allowing the buyer to short-circuit a long discovery and qualification cycle only to find out that a factory doesn’t have the right equipment that meets the stringent manufacturing and metrology needs, can’t work with the desired materials, doesn’t have the right certifications, etc. etc. etc.
• allowing a CNC factory to advertise its services to buyers who can quickly qualify it for RFPs and purchases

<p[> Partfox is the primary offering form Orderfox, founded in 2016 to meet the needs of the industrial B2B sector, of which they saw one of the greatest needs to be CNC factory location and matching for precise part pairing. While you may not have heard of them, they have been valued in Europe as a Unicorn startup and are just entering the North American marketplace.

For the Buyer

PartFox is an AI-driven commission-free global (and local) network (that can be accessed at no-cost for simple searches) that matches buyers with manufacturers that can meet their exact part manufacturing needs with exact machining capabilities, and can even take into account capacity and availability. When they say perfect match, they mean it because they can take into account the exact machining (including metrology) requirements, material requirements, dimensionality, volume requirements, region and country requirements, and certification requirements.

Using the platform is just a matter of

1. creating a profile
2. uploading your part file as a PDF (which will be parsed by an advanced AI solution) or an ISO 10303 Standard for the Exchange of Product Data STEP (STP) file (which allows for even more precise parsing due to its standard formats for 2D and 3D geometric data)
3. specifying the region and capacity requirements

and then letting the platform find the matches. Then, a buyer can reach out through the platform to the manufacturer to let them know of an opportunity for an in-network manufacturer or connect through the manufacturer’s website for an out of network manufacturer. Using Partfox can significantly speed up an average direct Procurement process, and once an organization has embedded such a solution into their direct Procurement process, they can see cycle time improvements of 30% to 40%.

Partfox is a lot more than just a simple matching marketplace. First of all, it supports over 60 metrology and manufacturing technologies, which means matches are much more precise than traditional supplier discovery solutions. Secondly, it has the largest network of CNC manufacturers with almost 100,000 manufacturers currently in its database. Like Tealbook, it can scour the web for manufacturers and, when it does so, identify the equipment, metrology, and manufacturing capabilities it publicly identifies. It then creates a record and sends an invite to that manufacturer to register on its network to update its profile with any additional capabilities and maintain it over time.

I’d like to call out the 100,000 manufacturers. This is one of the largest, if not the largest, listing of CNC manufacturers out there, and definitely the largest we’ve seen with deep part match capability. It’s that latter part that counts when doing supplier discovery for custom manufacturing.

Before, or after, doing a search, the buyer can create a request for one or more parts, which contains the basic details required for exact matching extracted from the uploaded PDF or STP file, and specify the quantity and basic RFP requirements of quantity, delivery date, incoterms, currency, language required for communication, and deadline to express interest. This can then be pushed to all matching manufacturers in an area, or a subset of your choice, and can be published as public (where any manufacturer can search for, see and respond to your request) or private (and restricted only to verified manufacturers on the platform, as per the tiers defined below). In addition, block lists can be defined to ensure that certain manufacturers will never (ever) see it.

It’s important to call out that the buyer has full control over the specifications the manufacturers see and can limit part file access to verified, select, or NDA-accepting manufacturers only.

This, however, is where buyer capabilities end in the current release as the platform does not yet support RFP responses in the platform (which is slated for the next major release). This means that they will have to (re)create a full RFP in their default sourcing platform when they want to collect price and auxiliary data and invite the newly discovered manufacturers to their formal process (which is easy since Partfox will give you all known contact information in the organization summary).

Also note that the current release does not integrate with any Source-to-Pay, Supplier/Vendor Management, or ERP systems or come with an Open API that allows you to export the basic RFPs you define and matching vendor profiles. They are currently working with select customers on an advisory board to determine what would be the most meaningful and efficient method of integration, which will appear in a release after the RFP response functionality has been completed, and the methodology will either be:

1. create the RFP in the ERP/S2P and push to PartFox
2. create the base RFP in PartFox, and then push the selected vendors and responses to the ERP/S2P
3. create a new standard export format and/or Open API and to each customer its own (which will likely come eventually anyway for customers that don’t use a standard S2P/ERP, but we all know that most customers want an out of the box solution, so you will likely see [a] or [b] well before this option)

(Early adopters will get input into these and similar product roadmap decisions!)

For the CNC Manufacturer

They can register on the platform and maintain a basic profile for free, before or after their website has been discovered (and if before, the platform can parse it and pre-populate some basic data in their profile for them) and be included in searches (but not in priority rankings), which ensures their profile is always up to date and accurate. For priority rankings they can purchase a basic (essential), intermediate (superior), or full (concierge) membership which will give them the ability to define capacities and show up in highly tailored requests (at the basic level), achieve a higher search rank and embed images and pictures in an enhanced company profile with a verification badge (at the intermediate level), and, in addition to a top search slot (as concierge vendors are ranked before superior vendors who are ranked before essential vendors who are ranked before free vendors), concierge-level manufacturers receive expert deal support, preferred buyer recommendations, and exclusive concierge deals.

Moreover, member manufacturers can access the integrated order management system that allows them to get (real time updates on) RFP invitations from buyers, see order requirements, and respond that they are interested directly through the platform. Moreover, premium members can access support services to help them identify potential buyers, access private RFQs, and get help with responding to buyer RFPs.

The supplier profile allows them to specify where they are, how to contact them, and all of the capabilities and certifications that the platform will match on including metrology, machinery, materials, and technologies — with over 60 different technologies supported along with all of the corresponding material, machining, and metrological capabilities of relevance.

So if this sounds like a solution that can solve your direct manufacturer supplier discovery process, which is becoming more critical by the day, you should check Partfox out. It is definitely worth your time to do so.