Special Report: 9.15.2009

Posted by Web Master on Tuesday, September 15, 2009

DAY 3:  THE NECA SEATTLE SHOW
Includes Joe's favorite speaker

NECA's show ended 9/15 Tuesday with a 10:30 to 2:30 session. At 1:00 p.m., while wandering around, I beheld what you see below -- a almost full house at the Ready Solar booth, for an on-the-show-floor intro to the company's "solar in a box" product. Check out also the promotional vehicle that attracted this late crowd. Guerilla marketing, anyone?

 

 Did you miss the posts here on SUNDAY and MONDAY ? Click through to see them. 

 

SOCIAL NETWORKING FOR THE ELECTRICAL SET

NECA's PR chief offers tips, ideas.

In the final set of management seminars, Beth Marguiles, NECA's director of public relations, offered contractors ideas on what they might do with the new social networking tools. Her advice: Consider only these three:  

1. Facebook 
2. LinkedIn 
3. Twitter

   Facebook, it turns out, has fan pages. According to Beth, that's the smart use for a company-- to use a Facebook page as a mirror of sorts to your website.  LinkedIn is about business connections and your personal expertise;  Twitter is, well, about tweets with 4.5 million users.  To cut to the chase: Beth thinks ECs should start with Facebook and build from there.  The idea: "Develop a reputation as an expert." They are, she said, "the new Google" -- and she noted the fact that search traffic on Google has declined since these things came into their own. Why? Folks are asking others in their social networks instead of doing a search. They trust what they get back from humans more than the famous search algorithm.

 The basics, as provided on one of her slides: 

• Be brief
• Keep it professional
• Update on a regular basis 
• Cite your sources
• Bring it home to your site

What should an electrical contractor post on a Facebook fan page, or LinkedIn, or tweet about? 

•  Safety
• Quality 
• The types of jobs that you do.
•  Best advice: Get testimonials from customers.

 NOTE that NECA does eat its own cooking. It has a Facebook fan page for the organization, another for the NECA Show, a Twitter page for both of those and its Energy Solutions blog.  In addition, Electrical Contrator magazine has its own pages. 

  

BEST NEW PRODUCT -- FOR DISTRIBUTORS
Convert your counter to high-tech!

Yes, it's a surprise, but there was a distributor-oriented product on display at The NECA Show.  As you might imagine, I wandered over from time to time to the TED magazine booth at NECA's show.  While there, I met John Milner of iCSales (Jupiter, Fla.), who has invented something call the iCounterMat.   This electronic display also syndicates the new digital version of TED Magazine, which explains the fact I found them in the TED booth.  Milner is a partner in United Electrical Sales, a rep firm. 

Here's how he got the idea, roughly two years ago:  "I was taking a couple of countermats into one of the distributors we work with.  The guy already had 12 of them out. But he walked me over to where they had more of them stored -- probably one inch of countermats, unused, gathering dust. That's when the lightbulb went on."

What was needed, Milner's brainstorm informed him, was something that could help people at the counter (and ultimately, their customers) show new products. The iCounterMat is a computer that you put into the counter (or beside with a kiosk). It includes a diretory of manufacturers and products (selected by the distributor) and plays videos. 

Here's the part that I really liked: The counter person can use it to look up information on a new product. But when a customer is on the other side of the counter, you touch the screen and it quickly reverses (turns 180 degrees) -- and now the customer is looking at the info, or the video, or whatever.

Milner is just getting to work on this.  His idea, essentially, is that after the initial installation, the distributor pays a small monthly fee to maintain content for each unit. And, while there's no fee to manufacturers to provide data, distributors could choose to ask for co-op money from the manufacturers with information loaded on the machines to pay it.  

 What's the point? It's not another website. It's not an overloaded, hard-to-search database. It's about new products! "A distributor who uses this is going to sell more new products. A counter worker can find a video on a new product and show it to the customer, right there," Milner said.

If you think about it, this is perfect for the electrical industry -- one in which new product information just does not flow as easily it should -- from manufactuer to rep to distributor (and on to the counter person working for the distributor) . . . and ultimately through to the customer. 

NEWEST NAED SUPPLIER MEMBER: DIOGEN LIGHTING

In search of an honest LED 'tube' -- ?

Diogen Lighting, a supplier with a booth at NECA, became the newest NAED Associate Member during the show. I went over to that booth to learn what the story might be. Of course, being an intrepid reporter grounded firmly in today and reality, my first question was:

  "What does your company's name have to do with Diogenes?"

  That's just the kind of sharp-as-a-tack question you want asked, isn't it?

  Answer: It's not clear. However, after asking, I noticed the young man in the booth was leaning on a tube -- which looked very much like a fluorescent tube. Except the thing contained a bunch of little LED light sources. Is that a WOW for you? Well, it was for me. And, from listening to the two people in the booth on Tuesday, it seems that the electrical contractors walking by during the NECA event had a "wow" reaction as well. 

OK, so much for the real world. Let's go back 2300 or so years into history. Who was Diogenes? He was one of my favorite ancient Greeks, but not for the reason you think. There are two stories about the guy that every schoolboy used to know (back when schoolboys were forced to digest stuff about ancient Greeks and Romans):

 

1. The story everyone probably already knows is about Diogenes and the Lamp. According to reports, this famous cynic wandered around carrying a lamp -- in daylight. Asked what the heck he was doing, Mr. D came back with: "I'm looking for an honest man.
2. Before we get distracted, remember that "cynic" is derived from the Greek word for Dog. I believe naming these people after dogs had something to do with the way cynics behaved
3. However, those are not the reasons to love Diogenes. THIS is, I think: There is a legend that Alexander The Great was in the same area as Diogenes and went looking for him. On the day he encountered the cynic, Diogenes was taking a bath -- out in the sun. Alexander excitedly walked over to the spot -- and asked this man, who he admired, if there was a service (a favor) he could do for the guy. "Yes," said Diogenes The Cynic, to Alexander the Great..."stand out of my sunlight." 

 

 I SAVED THE BEST FOR LAST, SO READ THIS!

Legrand tackles field productivity
While all of the above is from Tuesday, what follows are details from a session on Sunday -- "Increase Productivity and Reduce Risk." The speaker was Steve Killius, a VP with Legrand North America.  Contractors live and die based on productivity, whether they realize it or not, so it was an important topic for them to consider.  Another side note to consider:  Killius is from Legrand's "Contractor Resource Group."  That was new to me-- I honestly did not know that ANY electrical supplier had a "contractor resource group." Killius told me Legrand's CRG came into being in January 2009, so maybe I'm not too far behind in learning about it.  But it begs the question, why don't more manufacturers have these groups?

To sum up the presentation: Legrand sure owns a lot of manufacturing ops these days, doesn't it? If you look at some of the products made by each of those manufacturers, there are ways to build a job electrically that are FASTER (and lower in risk) for a contractor than "standard" methods (esp. if you consider that electrical drawings seem to still be based primarily on the state-of-the-art thinking of 1963).  

However, despite the breadth of Legrand product lines, Killius did not talk about his company's swell new products or how to combine products from each of Legrand's various divisions, nor about how wonderful his company can be. Instead, he went over a small number of existing products and how they could be used to substitute for what contractors routinely have done -- making a lot more money for the EC in the process.

 After going over all of the reasons to focus on productivity (and there are many and they are all very good), Killius talked about what is needed: "A Mind Shift" and "new best practices."

 One salient idea: If you see a pipe-and-wire job, build it with MC cable in cabletray. Now, that's not exactly rocket science, and it is far from a new idea. What was more important to me was that Killius spent some time (showing photos to back up his assertions) that an MC-in-tray approach can be just as "neat and workmanlike" as those wonderful, "clean" (beautiful, even) pipe-and-wire installations in which many old-line contractors (and their foremen and journeyman) specialize . . . which he called "pipe organs."

In my opinion, this assertion by Killius, replete with the photos, was VERY important. NECA contractors are proud of how they build jobs electrically; it's the reason the association invested enormous efforts to start up (and now extend and sustain) the National Electrical Installation Standards.

Killius went on from there to talk about using aluminum cable, making use of prefabricated assemblies, and ECs installing more tray than needed for just the electrical piece of a job (helping the low-voltage/datacom and security installers and reducing "trade coordination issues" on a given project). Modular wiring systems were covered and, of course, prewired raceway.  What was very clear from Killius's approach was that he had listened to electrical contractors react to these ideas. For example, he suggested the use of "plug & play wiring devices," and noted that contractors could use aprentices to finish installation at the end of a given job. That sort of thing should be music to a NECA contractor's ears.

Nothing he was talking about, he said, "is new. There's nothing here outside the Code." He cited an instance (the local area involved was not provided) where an electrical inspector called local ECs together to show some of these ideas to them (which is very interesting). But he also noted a project on which Legrand's CRG "proved" to a given EC that $300,000 in savings were available from a "mind shift" away from the traditional appraoch . . . and the contractor didn't do it.

"Change is hard," Killius summarized. Hey, ask Obama!

On the other hand, working with another EC, Legrand's CRG did some of this "value engineering" to shift to speedier, smarter installation methods -- and (Killius reported) "we helped him to take 78,000 man-hours out of a job." Unfortunately, he didn't provide perspective (78K out of 250,000 hours, or 78K out of 750,000?). But for the NECA contractors in his audience, it probably didn't matter. At a cost (labor and benefits) of $75/hour -- to use a number -- the savings on labor are nearly $6 million for a union EC in many places. Of course, doing this kind of rethink/redesign of a given project takes some overhead time/investment, and perhaps the materials purchased were higher in cost than those originally considered. But it would seem as if this case study job had a huge financial savings for the contractor involved.

Green addendum: The NECA-IBEW booth for the LMCC in Portland featured the area's work on green initiatives, including a windmill (mini version) and an electric vehicle charging station.

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MORE TOMORROW: A final wrap to appear here tomorrow will feature several photos taken at NECA's Show.