industrial//industrial ecosystem//sophisticated buyer

A sophisticated buyer is a customer like a large plant, whose purchasing is backed by production, maintenance and automation engineers with very high technical knowledge, so the vendor or integrator negotiates against people who know what things really cost.

A sophisticated buyer is a customer like a large plant, whose purchasing is backed by production, maintenance and automation engineers with very high technical knowledge, so the vendor or integrator negotiates against people who know what things really cost.

They know the real cost of the hardware, the cost of changing vendor, how long equipment lasts, what a stoppage costs per hour, which spares are critical, which maintenance contracts exist, which systems could be replaced by whom.

That knowledge is what makes industrial negotiations hard, and it is the buyer's defense against the lock-in the aftermarket is built on. The three departments pull in different directions: purchasing wants price, production wants uptime, maintenance wants spares and support, and the ERP is where the three meet (industrial ecosystem).