Resolution Layer Case Study · Read & Diagnose
Stainless steel production.
A product-data read of a stainless steel producer's public website — where the web page, the product sheet and the grade data sheet each describe the same steel, and do not always agree.
This is a real EKOM analysis, with the client's identity removed. The client is a stainless steel producer. It publishes no price list and does not sell online. What it publishes about its products is three overlapping records: a web page for each product, a PDF product sheet behind each page, and data sheets for its grades — chemistry, designations and properties. EKOM read all three and lined up each product's grades so the three sit side by side. 15 findings are reported here. The automated analysis also raised findings that came from EKOM's own handling rather than the site; those were withdrawn, and none is in any count below.
What makes this record different is who reads it, and when. A retailer's product page is read at the moment of purchase. A producer's grade data is read earlier and travels further: an engineer writes it into a drawing, a buyer into a purchase order, a service center into the item record it sells from — and each of them checks it against the producer's own documents before anyone calls the producer.
In most catalogs a wrong field costs a click. Here it costs a specification — and a call to find out which of the producer's own documents was right.
The producer's own grade codes, file names, most exact sizes and verbatim misprints have been removed or generalized here, because on a producer's site those together can identify the producer. Grade families, counts and the direction of every disagreement are exact.
What's inside
- At a glance — where the findings concentrate, and how three kinds of document were read side by side.
- What a buyer runs into first — a grade designation the producer uses nowhere else, and a product sheet whose grade table has slipped.
- The receipts — data sheets that contradict the producer's other documents, and pages that disagree with their own PDFs.
- What a search tool is told — how the same documents read to a buyer's search, a purchasing portal or an assistant.
- Where it traces back, and what's next — the four likely mechanisms, and the order to fix in.
Nothing was supplied and no internal system was touched. Everything below was read from the producer's public website, and the headline values were re-read on the live site before this study was published.
4
Data sheets printing a carbon
limit ten times too high
7
Page-and-PDF disagreements
on size or grade list
4
Likely upstream
mechanisms
Where the 15 concentrate
Theme
What it is
Findings
The wrong grade on one product line
A duplex grade under a designation the producer uses nowhere else; a product sheet's grade table out of line with its own UNS row
2
Data sheets that disagree
A carbon limit printed ten times too high; a European number that does not match the steel name beside it; two chromium ranges for one grade
5
A page and its own PDF
Different size ranges, and different grade lists, for the same product
2
Tables that cannot all be true
A standard size wider than its finish allows; sizes that fall between two ranges; an orphan footnote
3
Grades sold, not documented
Flat-product pages without a full grade list; ten grades offered with no data sheet
2
Copy in the PDFs
Fourteen distinct misspellings, one of them a section heading repeated across fifteen data sheets
1
How EKOM read this site
1
Read
The public site as published — product pages, grade pages, surcharge tables, and the product sheets and data sheets they link. No file handoff, no credentials.
Each product read three ways: its web page, its product sheet and its grades' data sheets.
2
Line up
Put each product's grades in rows, with what the page, the product sheet and the data sheet each say, so a disagreement shows in one place.
The producer code and the UNS number are the keys. Most findings test the rest against them.
3
Analyze
Find each disagreement, rate its severity, and tie each one to the documents and values behind it — then check each PDF finding on the PDF itself.
15 findings reported — 8 from the analysis, 7 from EKOM's direct checks — in 6 themes, with 4 likely causes.
Findings from an automated read of a public site, checked by an analyst — not a list verified by the producer. Some differences may be deliberate — a product-specific code, a product-specific index — and where a finding could be, the study says so rather than asserting a correction.
What a buyer runs into first.
The lead finding is about the grade itself — the first thing a buyer specifies. On one product line, the page and its PDF agree on a grade designation that every other source on the site contradicts.
Critical · The wrong grade name
A lean duplex grade, published on one product line under a designation the producer uses nowhere else.
On one long-product line, the web page and its product sheet both print the right producer code and the right UNS number for a lean duplex grade — and, beside them, a type designation that is not a standard duplex designation. Every other product page that sells the same grade, and the grade's own data sheet, print the correct designation.
Where
Code · UNS · Type
Verdict
That product's web page
right code, right UNS, a designation used nowhere else
disagree
That product's PDF
the same
disagree
Two other product pages and the grade's data sheet
right code, right UNS, right designation
agree
A buyer looking for the grade by name would not find it on that line, and a buyer who reads the wrong designation has to decide whether it is a typo or a grade. Either way, the answer comes from a sales rep rather than from the page.
Critical · A grade table out of line
The same product's PDF names five grade rows wrongly.
In the product sheet's grade table, the type row no longer lines up with the UNS row. A low-carbon 304 UNS number is printed against 301; the 316L UNS number against two other types; one row carries another grade's UNS number and type; one UNS number has lost a digit. The web page corrects most of this, but not all of it: one row still carries a UNS number that belongs to a different grade, where two other product pages give the right one. Read across, the sheet a buyer downloads says 316L's UNS number belongs to two other steels.
Data sheets that disagree with the producer's other documents.
The data sheet is the document a specifier keeps. Here it carries limits and designations that another of the producer's documents, or the standard, contradicts.
Finding
What the sheet prints
Severity
A carbon limit ten times too high
Four data sheets — two duplex grades, two ferritic — print maximum carbon a factor of ten above the low-carbon limit. A product data sheet from the same producer prints the correct limit for both duplex grades, and one ferritic sheet describes its grade as a variation of a base grade whose sheet allows less than half the carbon it prints for itself
high
The wrong European number
The data sheet for the common molybdenum austenitic grade, and the grades page, give a European number that does not match the European steel name printed beside it on the sheet
high
Two chromium ranges
A duplex grade's own data sheet and a product data sheet from the same producer give different chromium ranges for the same grade
high
Designations misprinted or missing
A European number with its trailing zero dropped; two European steel names with garbled letters; one sheet's ASTM designation left blank
high
Numbers the sheets leave out
The grades page gives European numbers for two martensitic grades whose own sheets leave the field blank
high
High · A carbon limit ten times too high
Anyone screening for low-carbon grades drops both duplex grades from the list.
A metallurgist reads past it — duplex grades are low-carbon whatever a sheet says. A buyer's filter, a distributor's item record or an assistant asked for low-carbon options does not. It takes the sheet at its word, and the same misprint on four sheets for four different grades looks like one template copied before it was checked.
Seven times, a product page and the product sheet it links publish different sizes or a different grade list for the same product.
Product
How page and PDF differ
Kind
A bar product
The page's range starts lower and ends lower than the PDF's
size
Hot-rolled sheet
Different maximum thickness, and different minimum lengths for the thinnest range
size
Rod
A different smallest diameter, with that size's ovality ten times larger on the page than in the PDF
size
A turned bar product
The page starts at a smaller diameter, with an exception for one grade; the PDF starts higher, for all grades
size
A second bar product, duplex
One grade on the page; two in the PDF
grade list
Cold-rolled sheet, ground finish
The PDF adds two grades the page does not list
grade list
Cold-rolled, bright-annealed finish
The page includes a ferritic grade the PDF omits
grade list
And inside single tables
A bright-annealed standard size wider than the bright-annealed width table allows. Two products whose size ranges leave a gap between them — one bar, one coil. A size table that cites a footnote the page does not have.
These are the fields a buyer selects on. The PDFs carry dates from 2022 to 2025 and the pages may have been updated since, which would make the sheet the older copy — an inference from the documents; the producer's product record settles it. Either way, the PDF is the document a buyer downloads, files and sends on.
What a search tool is told.
One idea about the findings rather than more findings — because a producer's documents are increasingly read first by tools that take each value as printed.
A person who knows stainless reads past most of this. The documents are increasingly read first by things that do not: a search that matches on grade name misses the duplex grade on that product line. A filter for low carbon drops two duplex grades. An exact-match lookup against European references returns the wrong steel, or none. A page-level record of a hot-rolled or plate product knows its sizes and not its grades, because on those pages the grades appear only in the PDFs.
Medium · Grades sold, not documented
Ten grades the producer offers have no grade page and no data sheet.
They are on product sheets as available grades. A buyer can see that the product comes in them, and has nothing from the producer to check the chemistry against. On the flat-product pages, separately, the grades — between three and twenty-five per product — are listed in full only in the PDFs: the cold-rolled pages name some grades in their finish grid, and the hot-rolled and plate pages show none.
Observed, not counted
One thing held up completely: every row of the six monthly alloy-surcharge tables read — three product families, two months — adds up to its stated total to four decimal places.
The long-product tables — grades, sizes, tolerances — are fetched after the page loads, so a crawler that does not run scripts sees empty tables, and several are labeled for assistive technology with internal names rather than titles. Four further items are held rather than counted: one grade printed with and without a suffix, the same grade under different producer codes on different products, one surcharge table's metal average running above the others for the same month, and minimum and typical properties printed for the same product without saying which is which. Each may be deliberate; three are one-line questions for the producer, and the fourth needs a label.
Fifteen findings across three kinds of document can look like fifteen separate corrections. They point to four likely mechanisms — and a mechanism can be fixed once and stopped from recurring. Each tell below is a pattern in the documents; the mechanism is EKOM's reading of it.
Three documents kept separately
The tell: a product page and the sheet it links publish different sizes and grade lists for the same product; the grades page carries European numbers its own data sheets leave blank. It produced both page-and-PDF findings and the European-number gap.
Tables retyped rather than generated
The tell: a type row slipped against its UNS row; numbers that each lost a digit; steel names with garbled letters; a footnote that is not there. It produced the slipped grade table, the wrong European number, the misprinted designations, the size-table findings and the misspellings.
One sheet copied to make others
The tell: the same wrong carbon limit on four sheets for four different grades, and the same misspelled heading on fifteen. Both are consistent with a template copied before it was checked.
Copies not drawn from one grade record
The tell: one grade under two designations on different product lines; the same grade under different producer codes, which may be deliberate; ten grades sold with no data sheet; one grade with two chromium ranges. It produced the lead finding, the two chromium ranges and both undocumented-grade findings.
Correcting four carbon limits by hand corrects four sheets. Generating the page, the product sheet and the data sheet from one grade record — and checking each against it before it is published — corrects those, and every disagreement the next reissue would create.
79%
Asked which content they find most valuable when researching a significant purchase for work, 79% of 1,018 engineers and technical buyers named the datasheet — the top answer, ahead of technical articles and CAD drawings. In the same survey, an informative, well-maintained website was the strongest indicator of quality for technical buyers assessing vendors. Nearly every finding in this study sits in those two places: the producer's website and the product sheets and data sheets it links.
TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec, 2025 State of Marketing to Engineers
For a producer, quality and reliability are proven in the steel. The documents are where a buyer meets them first — and here, they do not yet say one thing. A duplex grade under a designation the producer uses nowhere else. Four data sheets with a carbon limit ten times too high. A bar whose size range depends on which document is open.
Each one travels as far as the document does. An engineer screening for low-carbon duplex drops two grades from the list. A buyer who asks for the misnamed grade starts a conversation instead of an order. A service center that takes the European number from the data sheet carries the wrong one into its own item master. Search tools and purchasing portals read the same documents, and take each value at its word.
None of these is a metallurgical decision. Each looks like a copy that drifted — and in several, another of the producer's own documents already holds the right value. That is why the fix does not have to be sheet by sheet: bring the copies back to the producer's own values, or to the published standard where it prints none, then draw every page and sheet from one grade record so they stay there through the next reissue.
On paper, reliability means one answer to every field, in every document a buyer opens.
Three moves, in order. The first needs no new data at all — and the one that looks most mechanical deliberately waits.
This pass read and diagnosed. The same structural understanding powers what follows — turning three documents a buyer has to cross-check into one record everyone reads the same way.
1 · Apply the corrections the producer's own documents already answer
Realign the slipped grade table to the type and UNS number the page and the data sheets agree on. Correct the carbon limits where another of the producer's sheets prints the right one, and the European numbers where the steel name beside them gives the answer. Correct the copy. Approved as patterns, with every line listed.
2 · Settle the questions that gate the rest — starting with which size range is current
Reconciling page and PDF looks mechanical, and it waits on one answer per product: which range and which grade list the product record holds. So do the chromium range, the gaps between size ranges, and whether the undocumented grades get a data sheet or an "on request."
3 · Hold the line at the next reissue
Run the same read against every page and sheet before it is published — every grade name checked against its UNS number, every limit against its siblings, every page against its PDF — so these findings become what the check catches before a sheet goes out.
This is how EKOM moves a product record from insight to impact —
and keeps every grade reading right as the range grows.