AVTECH provides Room Alert monitors, sensors and software for environment monitoring situations in food management, cold storage, manufacturing, and other industries. The customers and prospects all have their unique needs for monitoring environmental conditions that impact their people, property, products, and/or processes. This is because everyone has different situations, needs and expectations. There are common concerns for many and these often relate to industry, application, or region.
Increasing regulatory demands are having a growing impact on customers. To assist here, AVTECH is incorporating a “Regulatory Guidelines” feature within their Room Alert Manager software and Room Alert Account online service to set up monitoring within those guidelines easily. Users can see how their monitoring thresholds match up against regulatory recommendations or requirements. These will initially focus on concerns for OSHA’s pending heat index concerns for worker safety, ASHRAE’s guidelines for IT and facilities infrastructure, FDA food safety issues, and they will add more over time.
AVTECH customers are also faced with an increased need to know and understand what’s happening, while experiencing reduced time availability, and a bombardment of information from many sources throughout their day. Patented Room Alert features such as Monitor 360 enable advanced alerting based on combinations of sensor status, averages, ranges, and more. It allows users to know more about “Why” a situation has occurred and not just that a condition has changed. It can indicate a need for maintenance, be used in predictive service, or indicate the elevation of alert status. In a world where AVTECH customers are receiving alerts all day long for single events, this is a way to consolidate alerts into what is most important so they can be addressed immediately. This feature alone is one of the reasons many of the world’s most recognized organizations are installing Room Alert in many applications across their entire worldwide operations.
One demand all customers seem to share now is a need to get their orders immediately. Perhaps it’s an expectation from the online world we live in or a simple realization that once they need environment monitoring, they know that every moment without it is a risk threatening their organization's business continuity. Most people shopping for Room Alert respond to a situation that has just cost them inconvenience, time and money… many times a lot of money! AVTECH is the only current provider that ships the same or next business day even under a supply chain crisis for most industries. They have a professional supply chain managers on the staff and work in close partnership daily with their contract manufacturer. “Our build ahead model is based on growth expectations of 25-30% each year. So, we have plenty of inventory on hand while competitors are quoting 6-8 week deliveries,” says Michael Sigourney, Founder & CEO of AVTECH Software. He is always striving to have a genuine connection with their customers and resellers, building relationships and seeing opportunities from the perspective of “solving their needs” first.
Michael says, “We work to find good people that are motivated and want to do good things. Considering this characteristic first, along with the skills for a position, has helped us to build a highly diversified team of qualified people who resolve concerns by approaching challenges from different perspectives. In the end it seems to result in better products and services for our customers.” This leads to strong organizational growth and continued forward movement while having fun in the process.
Providing Unique Solutions
It would be easy to say that 33 years of determination and focus on continued improvements gave Room Alert a market advantage. Some might even say it is Room Alert’s unique fire engine red enclosures. However, it may be a more subtle understanding that their strategy has always focused on creating the highest value by providing significant benefits at the lowest cost. “We then support our products by building in extreme ease of use and reliability. AVTECH has never been a “get rich quick” organization,” says Michael. “We work extremely hard to keep our costs low, complete significant testing of our products to verify they work as expected, and we use our software capabilities as a secret weapon.”
Competitors have come and gone over the last twenty years because they often think that providing a monitor or controller for sensors is all that is needed. However, environment monitoring is about a lot more than that. Their Room Alert software options allow many advanced features such as unlimited users, multistage alerting, unlimited thresholds, alert hierarchies, scheduled alerting, data logging, data export, secured data, multi-axis graphing of unlimited sensors, mapping, incorporation of pictures or video links with alerts, customizable alert text, real-time data in alerts, and much more.
All of this leads to an extremely high “value ratio” that Michael believes is the best in the industry. “When you add in the real people service and support of our entire team, then you can quickly understand how we have been able to build our huge customer base across 187 of 196 countries. This lead the U.S. Small Business Administration to recognize AVTECH as the “2018 Small Business Exporter of the Year”, a recognition that we are extremely proud of!”
Averting Disasters
The most important benefit of environmental monitoring is the immediate receipt of alerts that allow an organization’s staff to respond immediately. When a problem occurs or a threat develops, response time is the most important factor to prevent loss or damage. AVTECH has been telling people to incorporate disaster prevention instead of disaster recovery for more than 20 years. Every day of the year, people contact them to share their personal horror stories as if they are unique.
Automatic corrective actions are one of the most powerful ways to address environmental threats because they represent immediate action to avert or reduce the impact of a disaster. Consider a simple flooding situation where alerts are sent out immediately as water is detected. Having a pump automatically remove water while staff are in route could be the difference between a wet environment or a complete business shutdown. Automatically turning on backup HVAC systems or a fan can save valuable hardware from getting damaged due to overheating. Recognizing motion and turning on lights, automatically closing or locking a door when an event occurs, or automatically turning on backup power generators after a loss of power could keep a business operational. These are just simple examples that don’t require humans to be on-site and yet can provide business-saving benefits immediately when needed.
Imagine managing multiple buildings or properties such as a chain of restaurants and having a regional weather event like a hurricane or snowstorm. Getting to a facility might not be possible and being at multiple locations at one time is impossible. Automation is the most productive solution and can easily be used to reduce response times and allow a proper response without putting staff at risk.
If a manager is out of town or far from the restaurant when a problem develops, waiting until they get there to respond is a huge risk to business continuity. Not to mention the impact on that person’s relationship with their spouse and family when an event happens after hours. AVTECH believes proper use of Room Alert can resolve this and give staff and managers the peace of mind they need and deserve.
Monitor360
One of the most exciting developments within the Room Alert platform is that AVTECH is developing patents around the unique functions of their technology that provide unique benefits to the customers. An obvious example is the “Monitor360” feature for which they recently received a patent. This is enabled as a collection of software features within the user interface.
Monitor 360 allows users to create a “combination sensor” where the status of various sensor conditions when triggered result in a sort of compound alert. This is better than a group of random, non-related alerts which are often ignored. This becomes more informative and valuable as users understand “Why something is happening” better than just “What happened”.
Michael goes on to narrate an example through which he explains the working of the solutions:
“Let’s say that you run the most popular restaurant in town and are fortunate enough to enjoy operating at full capacity most nights. You are known for fresh food, exceptionally prepared meals, and serving them at the perfect temperature. Imagine some typical restaurant event scenarios that alone might not be of concern. However, when they occur simultaneously, this may indicate a pending disaster that could ruin an evening, cause damage to your reputation, or worse.
Your night starts and everything is prepped for a great evening. It’s a normal night and expectations are high that your team will knock it out of the park again. Tonight, your chef will again offer her special menu of local favorites. However, around 6:30, as the night is getting underway you notice a few conditions that start to concern and even annoy you. You are busy so you shrug it off and keep going.
First, you found the cooler door left open multiple times. You thought you smelled something like plastic burning in a back hallway although shrugged it off thinking it was staff smoking inside instead of outside the back door. It is winter and you’ll remind them of the rules again later. Then around 7:15 the chef pulls you aside and says she thinks the fish is not up to her standards. What’s going on here? Well, if you are not using automated monitoring with a product like Room Alert you might not know until it’s too late. It’s not your fault though, as these little issues when presented individually may appear as typical and non-threatening. However, it could indicate a serious threat when the puzzle pieces are put together. You see where I’m going here, right?
Okay, here’s what happened and then I’ll share how Room Alert with Monitor360 can save the day. First, the delivery guy propped open the cooler door with a 2x4 that he found on the floor and sprung the hinge on the cooler, now it won’t close properly without a strong slam. This is why your staff is unintentionally leaving it open. Cold air is flowing out the door since 2:00 this afternoon, so the old power supply to the cooler is constantly working for hours now and repeatedly overheats, causing the wires to smolder and putting the restaurant at risk of a fire. The cooler temperature has been rising for hours, so fresh foods when delivered at 2:00 and expected to get colder are getting warmer throughout the day. Can you see the disaster approaching? Let me throw you a lifeline.
First, sometimes people notice these things although often they think little of these events and go on with their job. Only you and perhaps the chef are likely to try and resolve these issues when known, although she is busy preparing her creations and you need to be in the front of the house greeting guests.
Now, with a mid-sized Room Alert monitor and a few inexpensive sensors, you can easily monitor the cooler temperature, door open/close status, power draw and on/off status, as well as the smoke. Individually these may appear less important. However, by using Monitor360, you can combine these to understand that the cooler temperature is rising because the door is remaining open after each person pulls food from it. The power is flickering as the power supply is overheating, creating a smoldering wire situation. By getting a compound alert using Monitor360 you have what General Custer called “Clear evidence” that you are in trouble. You need to take action.
By knowing earlier in the day about the door, temperature, and power issue you would have clearly understood this is a bigger problem and taken action. You could have the asked the busboys to come in early and move all the food from the failing cooler to the backup cooler, called the electrician to replace the power supply, and asked your handy man to fix the cooler hinges. Everything could have been repaired before you opened your doors at 6:00 and you would have peace of mind that you could focus on the business at hand. Further, you could avoid replacing all the food that would go bad overnight and avoid a potential fire that wipes out the restaurant because you acted upon the informative alert from Monitor 360 to protect your business proactively.
In the end, this will be another disaster averted by Room Alert although perhaps more important, you saved the restaurant and stay in business. In a perfect world, you would not even realize how close you came to a disaster because you invested in Room Alert.”
Towards the Future
AVTECH has been experiencing consistent growth for years now, and they are confident that the environmental monitoring market will support strong growth above other industry averages for the next few years. The company believes that there are minimal market constraints and that awareness worldwide of new applications will pull them into new markets. One of the great things about Room Alert is that it is a platform that is not confined to a specific vertical market. They started in the IT world and continue to dominate there. However, AVTECH is now recognized as a strong solution for food service, housing, education, medical, pharmaceutical, warehousing, manufacturing, communications, logistics, aerospace, military, government and more.
AVTECH is drawing more on their software capabilities as a competitive advantage that puts distance between Room Alert and competitive offerings because they can draw on their 33 years of experience and incorporate their patented technologies such as Monitor360 and Digital Active Power Sensor. They will continue to improve and introduce new Room Alert models and sensors going forward.
AVTECH is also developing a greater voice than they ever have before. They create weekly content based on customers' experiences, their market research, and ongoing development that bring market awareness and benefit to others. More and more AVTECH is being asked for insight based on their huge customer base and the knowledge that we have active customers in almost all countries worldwide. The company has published a very popular Business Continuity Checklist recently (free online) that has been extremely successful in helping organizations worldwide improve their business continuity and readiness. AVTECH’s research is picked up by the Associated Press and then published in many publications worldwide. “To this end, we have a social obligation to share and leave the world a better place. I am excited about that”, says Michael.