Patent ID: 7333945

Claim:
A method for chemical product acquisition, the method comprising: receiving a product request comprising a plurality of search parameters identifying desired properties intrinsic to a chemical product, said search parameters designated as mandatory or permissive and said desired properties including chemical compatibility properties, performance properties, chemical reactivity properties and physical properties; querying a product database to identify one or more commercially available chemical products conforming to the search parameters designated as mandatory; and sending a result of the query to a user terminal for presentation to a user, wherein the results are ordered based on the degree to which intrinsic characteristics of each of the commercially available chemical products deviate from the values of the corresponding permissive search parameters; in response to the sent result, receiving a request for formulation of a chemical product conforming to the search parameters; querying a formulator database comprising data designating qualifications of each of a plurality of formulation suppliers to select a set of potential suppliers of the requested formulation; automatically distributing to each formulation supplier in the selected set a request for proposal for the requested formulation; and automatically communicating contracts reflecting the prepared terms from the supplier.