SSI Spotlights 2020 Security Solutions Awards Winners
The Security Services team of Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. sought to modernize its sales process. Organizations engage the Security Services team when they need to upgrade a security system or outfit a new facility. For example, Security Services creates a site design that shows customers where best to place the company’s MOBOTIX video surveillance cameras. This begins during the sales process.
Traditionally, system design professionals across the globe have created site surveys using pencil and paper – and most still do. Salespeople walk around with the customer taking notes on paper and photos on a phone or camera. Cobbling all this together can be a tedious, error-prone process. System re-designs, installation errors, and no cost change orders occur often in the industry. Konica Minolta used this conventional way of doing site surveys. Many of its salespeople did not have experience in security or engineering, making the manual approach even more difficult.
The Security Services team found a solution in the System Surveyor intelligent system design platform. This mobile, Cloud-based tool enables them to gather all system requirements and IoT assets in a single place. The software and app solve the problems associated with rudimentary site survey methods, a painstaking system design process, and outdated system records.
System Surveyor is now the team’s main design platform, providing an interactive drag-and-drop interface to place system components on a “living” digital floor plan. The team can upload or create floor plans, take and annotate photos, develop system layouts, specify required products such as cameras, and more. They can also generate a bill of materials with Konica Minolta part numbers already built into the tool.
The Security Services team has streamlined and unified their sales process. The visual, collaborative System Surveyor platform engages prospects and customers earlier in the sales cycle to accelerate proposal development and engineering planning. Now, instead of having to travel to every prospect’s site, salespeople can upload a floor plan or Google Earth snapshot to begin the system design.
Dan Kozich, Western Regional Sales Manager for Konica Minolta, uses these materials to start a personalized site plan in System Surveyor and then conducts a Webinar with the prospective customer: “Every customer I present to says we’re ten times beyond anything they’ve seen before. The professionalism we convey using System Surveyor demonstrates that Konica Minolta is a serious regional and national player in security system design services.”
The Webinar is a good qualifier for customer leads, according to Kozich. It not only saves travel time and costs but also lets him pitch to more prospects. If a customer wants to move forward, it speeds up the design process.
