Generalities - The Suppliers

Organo-metallic compounds, on the other hand, behave very much like organic compounds, e.g. they can be redistilled and may be soluble in organic solvents. A note of caution should be made about handling organo-metallic compounds, e.g. arsines, because of their potential toxicities, particularly when they are volatile. Generally the suppliers of such compounds provide details about their safe manipulation. These should be read carefully and adhered to closely. If in any doubt always assume that the materials are lethal and treat them with utmost care. The same safety precautions about the handling of substances as stated in Chapter 4 should be followed here (see Chapter 1). 

On the other hand, the NDT service business has evolved towards a more open market, in which the prime contractor requires a transparent access to the data provided by the supplier, in order to ensure the comparison of data obtained from different sources and at different periods of time. Existing fomiats are most of the time proprietary formats released by instrument manufacturers, generally dealing with a unique NDT method and not including complementary information on the acquisition consequently, they fail to meet these requirements. 

The pull system requires that the suppliers to the component fabricator, the component fabricator, and the fabricator s customers work closely together. This is essential as there is little room for error that causes costly line down situations for the fabricators customer. The trend is also for each part of the chain, supplier, fabricator, and customer, to take responsibility for the quality and performance of their own products. This has resulted in a term in general use today, self-certified supplier. ... 

A practical problem faced by tanneries is that many chemical products are proprietary products. Many suppliers do not specify the chemical composition of the products, so tanneries may have to seek additional information from the chemical suppliers in order to determine the environmental impact of the products they use. Sometimes it is also difficult for tanneries to receive accurate information also from the suppliers of the chemicals. Material safety data sheets generally provide some data on the toxicity of the products to humans and environment, and many tanneries use these as the sole source of information to determine the environmental impact of a certain substance. It can be expected in the EU in the future that tanneries will receive more detailed information about the substances used because of the REACH legislation. 

Brighteners are applied to cotton by methods similar to direct dyes. By far the most common are triazinyl derivatives of diaminostilbenedisulphonic acid (DAS) of general formula 11.5, where M is an alkali metal, ammonium or alkylammonium cation. Examples of groups Ilj and R2 are shown in Table 11.1. Most suppliers of FBAs market such compounds, often called DAST brighteners. Products in this class have sometimes been marketed because the supplier needed to offer something different for commercial reasons, or to avoid infringing a competitor s patent, rather than for any real technological necessity. 

Most laboratory chemicals are available in a number of grades, usually according to the concentration of impurities that are present. Generally, the purer the chemical, the more expensive it will be. A supplier s catalogue will indicate the different grades available for a particular chemical, together with the related purity specifications. You should bear in mind that the specification may not identify all of the impurities that are present. The nature of the impurities may or may not be important, depending on how the chemical is to be used. 

In the search for unique properties, chemists have isolated pertinent compounds, for which they have revealed the structures and in many cases developed syntheses. For many, in general, simpler compounds, industrially feasible preparations have also been worked out. However, for most of the more complex structures, nature proves to be much more efficient and cheaper, especially in the field of chiral compounds. Therefore, nature is still the supplier of many natural products, which are useful as such or as starting materials for other chemicals and auxiliaries in new chemical reactions. 

A typical feature of this model is that on the one hand the supplier tries to sell more volumes (increasing revenue), on the other hand the user tries to control costs by buying less and/or at a cheaper price. So the basis of business is a purely economic consideration. Ecological aspects are only considered if they provide a more cost-efficient solution than the traditional one. In general, only purchasing costs are directly linked to a product, while all other expenditures are allocated to all other relevant entities as recurrent costs. 

In terms of typology and categorisation, in many cases the supplier of the chemical substances retains the ownership of the chemical whereas the applicant usually retains the ownership of the application plant. So it seems that in general the core competences of the partners involved are maintained while they are embedded in an umbrella model based on a case-specific unit of payment. 

The level of technical service support provided for a given product generally tracks in large part where the supplier considers their product to be located within the spectmm of commodity to specialty chemicals. Technical service support levels for pure chemicals usually provided in large quantities for specific synthetic or processing needs, eg, ammonia (qv), sulfuric acid (see SULFURIC ACID AND SULFUR TRIOXIDE), formaldehyde (qv), oxygen (qv), and so forth, are considerably less than for more complex materials or blends of materials provided for multistep downstream processes. Examples of the latter are many polymers, colorants, flocculants, impact modifiers, associative thickeners, etc. For the former materials, providing specifications of purity and physical properties often comprises the full extent of technical service required or expected by customers. These materials are termed undifferentiated chemicals (9),... 

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