Are Heat Treat Reports Worth the Money?
For as long as there has been heat treating there have been heat treat “reports” floating around. You know the ones that purport to give you the exact size of the global commercial heat treat market, the number of vacuum furnaces in the world, the ones that promise to provide you with 1,000’s of legit heat treat e-mails-for whatever market you are looking at there is a report, for a price of course.
The team at “The Monty” tends to have a low opinion of these reports although logic tells us there must be some that are worth the money (we just haven’t seen them yet).
Generally, we just ignore these “reports” and hope that not too many people waste their money on them, however one floated across our desks the other day that was so bad it was almost laughable.
The report which you can see here purports to report on the leading builders of Vacuum Carburizing/Low Pressure Carburizing systems in the world from largest to smallest we believe although we could be wrong on that point. The only problem with this report is that almost half of the companies on the list have never built such systems and generally have no plans to.
“Tenova” as an example builds systems for steel mills, “AFC-Holfcroft” focuses on atmosphere furnaces, “Aichelin” to the best of our knowledge has never built such technology-these are but a few examples. On the other side of the coin furnace builder “IHI” which has built quite a number of VC systems are not even mentioned.
When we approached the writers of the report with our concerns they did not disagree with our thoughts, rather they thanked us for the input, said they were using a different “methodology” and promised they would keep our points in mind.
Well our point is be very, very careful before you invest in one of these probably “AI” generated reports.
