Brett Rickett, Director of Material and Process Technology at Molex, spoke at a Granta web seminar, describing materials information management at the leading manufacturer of electrical and electronic connectors. Managing information materials has long been recognised as an important strategic topic, so that a system has been in place to support this activity for over 15 years. However, in recent years, the company recognized deficiencies in this system—it did not provide a “single source of the truth” ( specifications data and data for CAE were in disconnected databases) and, because it had been a custom development project, it was expensive and difficult to make changes. Molex selected GRANTA MI for their new system following an extensive vendor assessment and, at the time of the webinar, had successfully completed initial deployment to 200 engineers. Legacy data had been transferred and roll-out to the remaining 1,200 engineers was approaching. Access to the database is provided both via a web browser and (via the MI:Materials Gateway technology) from within Molex CAD and CAE software. Asked about how the business justification for the system had been made, Rickett pointed to a corporate initiative on cost and efficiency, where benefits come “by taking out a lot of inefficient work activities in the product engineering community through having Granta serve as the source of information that gets rolled up into our NX CAD system, and then into our PLM. Being able to take out all of the cost and effort there was a great way to be able to show Return on Investment.”