Good sourcing makes a big difference for any hardware project but it’s such a massive time sink. I’ve tried to reduce the amount of time it takes to do that. Here’s how this works:
As someone who’d had to do their fair share of sourcing I realized I have a couple rule of thumbs and general idea of where I would look and what I would look for to find a decent set of suppliers. I’ve encoded this in a file as a set of guidelines for the agent to follow.
I then give it a description of what I am looking for. Here as a trial project I’ve given it this prompt:
“I am looking for a 200mAh lithium polymer batteries can you please find me factories near Shenzhen”
It then presents me with a PDF full of options. I’ve uploaded the PDF and a screenshot of one page as an example.
I’ve run this through a filter to redact any sensitive information because I don’t want to mass upload other people’s contact info on my blog.
I then ask the agent to contact all of them (or eliminate some if I don’t like them) and get quotes
One feature that’s only partially implemented is responses - many vendors tend to ask similar follow-up questions so I have asked the agent to create a knowledge repository for each project which it can then use to draft replies to vendor questions. Right now I manually approve these replies just as a guardrail.
I can then get a very good idea of what the market for this product. I’ve shown price vs volume here as a basic graph but once you have the data you can do more interesting things like lead time vs cost comparisons etc.
The idea here isn’t to take human judgement out of the equation - at the end of the day finding a factory that is a good fit is about more than just numbers, but it does make finding potential candidates a lot easier.
Ethics note: Because this agent can talk to humans and ask them to do real work I only do this if I know there is a real need and I am going to purchase.
This means the graph above is based on the initial search and not validated quotes at the end of the process - I don’t want to make these people do real work just for my blog post.