05.21.2008 — In between classroom sessions, attendees of Elan's Tech Week were able to visit with representatives of the training event's VIP sponsors. These breaks provided such sponsors as Lutron and Middle Atlantic with an opportunity to meet with dealers and installers one on one.

For Sensata Group, the breaks were "incredible."

Sensata Group set up a table at Elan’s biannual training event in Lexington, Ky. to promote its project management services. According to Sensata's president, Malcolm Wertz, "it's been received very well."

The services Sensata is offering (with or without design components) come in the form of a Web portal, which provides participating installers with access to tools for proposal, schematic and report creation.

Sensata Group's vice president Michael Voll says integrators need to keep their cash flow moving by scheduling installation jobs one right after another. The problem with doing that, he says, is that it creates a lack of proposal time.

Without professional-looking proposals, he explains, the job volume falls off.

"We don't want to be showing clients proposals with Magic Marker and sticky dots," he explains.

At Tech Week, dealers seemed to recognize the value of Sensata's services.

"We had some soft rollouts in Florida and other places," Wertz says, "but this is our unveiling to Elan dealers. It's been very positive."

According to Wertz, Sensata has been working with Elan for about six months. "We ran the idea past Paul Starkey [Elan's executive VP of sales and marketing]," Wertz says, "and Paul came up with the idea of sort of co-branding us with Elan here."

Voll and Wertz presented themselves to Elan dealers as the force behind what they call the "Elan: Bandwidth" service — complete with slogan, "The broader the bandwidth, the faster the connection."

When asked whether Sensata's alliance with Elan was exclusive, Wertz explained that Sensata Group has dealings with Crestron, Lifeware, Russound and others. "We're not limited to do design only for those partners," he explained, adding that Sensata has also partnered with Sunfire, Centralite Systems and Bluestar Distributors.

The vision for Sensata, according to Wertz, comes from years of "doing it all wrong." It is a concept that Wertz says he started 11 years ago.

"When I started in this business 15 years ago," he says, "I wasn't an MBA; I was twisting wires. So, over the years, I made a lot of mistakes — and learned from them."

Judging from the traffic stopping in front of its table at Tech Week, it would seem installers are interested in what Wertz has to offer.

"Our high-road aspiration is just to help the industry," he says.