When my oldest daughter left for college, her younger sister was sad to see her go but was ecstatic to hear that she could take over her bedroom and its attached bathroom. But with a change in room ownership came a request for a new bathroom color – a bright yellow like her sun dress or the daisies in our front yard. With these visualizations firmly implanted in my mind, I went to my local home improvement store to find myself faced with over three dozen yellow shades from four different paint companies. Bright and bold or soft and subdued? Metallic, shade, denim and weathered rocks – very cool, but impractical. After reviewing all of the paint swatches and a lot of metaphoric reasoning by my daughter, we finally narrowed the choices down to three. Back at the store, I was now faced with various paint types and prices that reflected different brand positions and technical characteristics. Flat, matte, eggshell, satin, semigloss or high-gloss? Added primer, exceptional durability, superior stain resistance, and an easy-to-clean finish – all a must for this bathroom. Low-odor paints, great! Zero-VOC formula, what? Does the average consumer even know what VOC stands for? I called my cousin, a paint contractor in New York, for his advice, and was lectured on paint adhesion, chemical resistance, additives, binders and VOC levels. What I did remember was not to buy on the basis of price alone, so I ended up buying the paint priced in the middle of the pack. Although my cousin supplied me with a lot more information than I needed to purchase two gallons of paint, our talk did motivate me to learn about how companies develop new paint shades and types.
In this article I address the essential software features used by leading coatings manufacturers to help bring their products to market, faster and cheaper, specifically from the product developer’s perspective. After a number of interviews, I discovered that many paint manufacturers use spreadsheets to manage their formulas today, and surprisingly, even those who have advanced formulation software at their disposal. Why? One reason is that many product developers don’t trust that their equations can be accurately replicated in a software vendor’s application. And that’s a great point to address first…