Are You Specifying Seals, or Just Buying on Price?

Are You Specifying Seals, or Just Buying on Price?

An enquiry landed on my desk last week.

O rings. Viton and Nitrile. Price was the only number in the brief.

There was nothing unusual about that. Most O ring enquiries read exactly like it. A part number, a quantity, a target price. Nobody expects a supplier to ask more than that, and most suppliers don't.

But before I quote anything, I look up the account.

This time, the same group already runs FFKM. Elsewhere in the business.

The Disconnect Nobody's Looking At

That's the detail that stopped me.

Somewhere in that organisation, someone has already decided that some applications are worth the higher specification. They've done the work. They understand that a seal exposed to the wrong chemical, the wrong temperature, or the wrong pressure can fail in a way that a cheaper material simply won't survive.

And somewhere else in the same organisation, on the same day, a different enquiry is going out for O rings on price alone.

Neither decision is necessarily wrong. The FFKM specification was almost certainly right for whatever it's protecting. The price led enquiry might be exactly right too, if the duty is genuinely low risk.

The problem isn't either decision individually. It's that there's no evidence anyone has compared the two.

That's not a budget problem. It's a visibility problem.

Why This Happens

Nobody sets out to under specify a seal. In 36 years of doing this, I have never once met an engineer or a buyer who deliberately chose a material they knew would fail.

It happens because the person raising the enquiry has no visibility of what's failing, or what's at stake, on a different line, in a different part of the same business. Procurement is doing exactly what procurement is meant to do: get the best price for the specification in front of them. The gap isn't in their judgement. It's in what information ever reaches them.

Large organisations are particularly prone to this. Different sites, different budgets, different engineers, sometimes different countries. A specification decision made carefully in one division has no natural route to inform an enquiry raised in another. Unless someone is actively looking for the pattern, it stays invisible until something fails.

What I Ask Before I Quote

I'm not in the business of telling every enquiry it needs a higher specification. Most of the time, a well chosen FKM or Nitrile is genuinely the right answer, and pushing FFKM where it isn't needed is just as much a failure of judgement as under specifying something critical.

But before I quote, I ask what's actually being sealed against. Not just the part number on the drawing. The process fluid. The temperature range it will actually see, not just the design temperature. Whether this is a duplicate of something running elsewhere in the business, and if so, whether that application has ever had a problem.

Most suppliers won't ask any of that. They'll just quote the part number.

A Simple Question Worth Asking Internally

If your organisation runs more than one seal specification across different sites or divisions, it's worth asking a straightforward question: has anyone ever actually compared notes?

Not a formal audit. Just a conversation between whoever specifies the critical applications and whoever raises the commodity enquiries. In my experience, that conversation rarely happens on its own, and it's usually the missing piece between a specification that's right on paper and one that's right in practice.

If you want a second pair of eyes on where your seal specifications might have drifted from what your processes actually need, a Diagnostic Day is built for exactly this. One day. One report. A decision you can defend.

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Andrew Sykes MCGI 36 Years Solving Seal Problems office@acumenseals.co.uk 07767 842601