I met the (Budapest, Hungary) Tyco representative, Mr. Morvai. Good news is he's much more helpful than earlier representative.

We discussed several tyco product families.

Earlier we thought that we might just be lame to use http://www.tycoelectronics.com/ efficiently. It improved since 2003, but it turned it there are real problems with it. When confirmed, we will contact their webmaster.

The way we did our search with the representative:

* paper catalog: less information than on web, but easier to get near the ideal choice becuase of pictures. (theoretically public, but we don't have it in hands of all developers)

* reference tables for converting from (say) VAG numbers (non-public)

* their SAP system (non-public)

* another system I don't know much about (non-public)

* http://startec.tycoelectronics.com/ what is exact URL? startrek... ? (this is said to have a guest account)

* http://www.tycoelectronics.com/ The narrower functionality is the only way for developers to select suitable products. However, this appears to be broken. Try to narrow down to Junior-...-timer, 6 pin, housings. You won't find product 282767-1 . This is a big problem. The WBO2 housing is in the same category, but you won't find that either. However that is not known to exist at Tyco, despite some pictures in a paper catalog that shows very similar but 4x2 recepticle housing (maybe it's microtimer, which exists - but on the pic it looked like junior timer, same as WBO²)

They do have it, but only the WBO² side.

The ECU side has to come from Delphi. Even though they have some similar JPT housing

Price and shipping time for all parts must be queried individually for part number (usually 6..7 part numbers for a solution). Most of the time, shipping time is about 60 days, and MOQ is 100 for bigger parts, and 500..1000 for smaller thingy.

I was in tyco's Hungarian production plan (35km from Budapest). In the window I spotted a connector similar to the SAAB MPT/JPT combo but with more pins: about 60 MPT + 20 JPT (of course, there was no name or part number next to it and noone knew about it (only that it's probably produced there). It's a bit big, but what is worrying is that we didn't find it on website: this confirms that we have problems using website.

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List of our favorite tyco part numbers

* DONE: 2 and 3 pin JPT recepticle housing, type C, different colors

* 4 pin JPT recepticle housing, does not say that it's type C, (eg. part no. 2-929504-1 ) but what else would it be ?

* small rubber seals

* big rubber boot for the connectors. I queried for matching boots for the 2 pin JPT (injector connector) because the 2 items the tyco search finds does not match.

* receptacle (Jorgen, you had hunted these before, right?)

The way now is

* using a simple spreadsheet, with fields like "TycoItemNumber,YearlyQuant,MOQ,PriceHUF,ShipWeeks,Note,QuoteDate"

* dig down: eg. products family, timer connectors, housing,... right down to the compare page for relevant parts. It usually lists

** 5..10 different colors for housings or

** 10..20 different materials for receptacles

* copy the table

* paste the table into spreadsheet

* copy the table from spreadsheet (this is needed)

* "paste special" with transpose option (this cannot be done directly from the opera paste, therefore the above step)

* make some column cutnpaste movements so standard columns are used for color, material, etc...

* I'll update with date, MOQ and price from latest tyco quote

If we can later parse pages like

* tyco compare page or

* [tyco product page]

We could keep a nice database of tyco items, even though tyco does not provide a convenient (XML) interface.

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Tyco fun

* here is some [information] I got from Tyco. As you would expect, it has no information on what items, or which of our orders are effected by the lack of the given polimer.