Find who can build a design

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The central thing OHM does: take a design, and tell you which workshops could produce it.

Running a match

Go to Match, pick a design, and run it.

Before you do, narrow the network — by country, city, region, process, or source. This matters more than it looks:

• The results get useful. Asking who can build something anywhere often returns thousands of workshops, which is not an answer to any real question. Asking who can build it in Belgium is.
• It's dramatically faster. An unfiltered match against the whole network can take around a minute. A filtered one typically returns in a few seconds.

Reading the results

Each result is a workshop, with a confidence badge (High / Medium / Low and a percentage) and the first line of an explanation.

Read the explanation, not the percentage. Every result opens to a breakdown of which requirements the workshop satisfied, which it didn't, and why — for example that it covers the printing and cutting a design needs but has nothing recorded for soldering.

Near misses, and how much slack to allow

A workshop that satisfies most of a design's requirements but not all of it is often still worth contacting — a single missing process is frequently an easy gap to fill. So results say plainly what is missing rather than reducing it to a score: "Missing 1 of 4 requirements", or "Meets every requirement".

A slider controls how much slack to allow, measured in missing requirements rather than a percentage — one gap means something quite different in a design with two requirements than in one with six. It starts at a single gap, and it cannot be relaxed past the point where a result would meet fewer than two of your requirements.

When nothing matches

Usually one of three things.

A required process is missing everywhere. Bench processes — soldering, assembly, drilling — are barely represented in the facility data OHM currently has. A design needing them can come back empty even where workshops could plainly do the work. This is a data gap, not a judgement about those workshops. See what's built and what isn't.

Your filter is too tight. Widen from city to country and try again.

The design doesn't say enough. If its documentation never records what it's made of or how it's produced, there's nothing to match against. OHM can only work with what a design actually states.

When one workshop isn't enough

Where no single workshop can perform every process, OHM can plan across several — one part printed here, another cut there. That plan is a supply tree, and it's what distributed manufacturing means in practice.

Be aware of the current limit: this only helps when different workshops have different gaps. Where the available data is thin in the same way everywhere, as it is today for bench processes, there's nothing to combine and results come back as single workshops or as gaps.

What happens next

You contact the workshops. OHM tells you who and why; the conversation is yours.

Take the list with you

Select the workshops you want and export them. You get a spreadsheet of who matched and how to reach them — name, location, contact person, email, phone, website — which you can sort, annotate, and share with people who have no OHM account.

ohm match requirements design.okh.json --output matches.json
ohm match export-contacts matches.json --design "Ventilator" -o contacts.csv

--format json instead, if something downstream is reading it rather than a person.

The export runs offline: it reads a match you already have and needs no server. That is deliberate — the moment you most want a list of who can help is often the moment connectivity is the problem.

An export is a snapshot. The design and the time of the match are written into the file header and its filename, because facilities change. Two exports taken a week apart can be compared directly to see which workshops dropped off the list — diff, or two columns in a spreadsheet.

Asking for a quote

Select the workshops and generate a request for quotation — one document each, addressed to that workshop, naming what matched and what did not.

Download the bundle, and you get a zip holding those documents plus the design package they refer to: everything to attach to an email and send. The recipient needs nothing from OHM. They have never heard of it, and the documents do not ask them to visit it — the design is in the attachment, not behind a link.

Fill in your name and email when you generate, and the RFQ says who is asking and where the quote should go. Leave them out and it says to reply to your message, which is true anyway: you are the one sending it.

Who may build a bundle

Assembling a bundle builds the design package if one does not exist yet, so it needs a write key by default. An instance that wants outreach to be a public act can allow anyone to do it by setting RFQ_BUNDLE_REQUIRE_AUTH=false. Previewing the documents never needs a key either way — that only formats what you already have.