Editor’s Note: This article explores an ongoing ADI investment in design and professional services for integrators. Interviews took place at the ADI AVIS event in Boston last month.
A few years ago, if you asked most people what an AV or security distributor does, they might have said, “Pick, pack and ship.” For today’s value-added distributors, however, the boxes are only the beginning.
Scott Normand, sales engineering senior director at ADI, runs a department built on exactly that premise.
For Normand, ADI’s real added value lies in the services that it layers on top of distribution. The company’s goal, he says, is to help simplify an integrator’s day-to-day work and make the integrator’s business more profitable.
Normand’s organization spans four groups: commercial sales engineering, residential sales engineering, design services and professional services. The last — a paid programming offering — arguably represents ADI’s most impactful integrator-enablement effort yet.
The case for ADI Professional Services
The case for ADI’s range of design and professional services is built on how unforgiving integration work can be.
“As I always say, the AV industry is one of the hardest industries to be in,” Normand acknowledges. “I mean, not just crawling through attics, but one little connector being pinned wrong can drive you crazy, can crash a job, all those things.”
The bigger problem, Normand says, is a lack of qualified, trained people. Industry analysis continues to point to the difficulty that integrators have finding knowledgeable, certified installers and field technicians. With very few college courses — let alone majors or minors — built for the AV industry, the labor pool remains uncomfortably constricted.
In building out its services offering, ADI has created an integrator-enablement resource to help fill that gap. It’s an antidote to the fact that there’s seemingly plenty of work out there, but perhaps not enough skilled people to do it.
Normand sees integrators using ADI’s design and professional services in one of two ways: Some use them to raise the quality of the jobs they already have. Others, meanwhile, treat them as the design department and programming department they never had to hire, thus freeing up their sales teams to go and win more projects.
ADI Professional Services can serve as a stopgap
What’s more, the services can serve as a stopgap: If an integrator happens to lose its lead programmer, ADI can cover the work for weeks or months while the company recruits a replacement.
Supporting that across the full breadth of ADI’s supplier partner network is no small feat, but Normand and his team make it happen. They train every Monday — 52 sessions a year — and Normand’s design manager catalogs every session and document, along with a master spreadsheet of contacts at supplier partners so that the team knows whom to call when a design requires outside expertise.
According to Normand, others in the industry have tried offering design help, often through portals that require integrators to fill out countless drop-down boxes and potentially eat up as much time as they’d otherwise conserve. ADI, he says, set out to do things differently.
Easy to engage
“Our founding principles were easy to engage and a fast turnaround,” Normand explains. “Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, look, I can’t have this even three days out. My customers tell me [that] I needed it yesterday.’ That’s how our industry works.”
For ADI’s complimentary design services, the process starts with an email to avdesigns@adiglobal.com. Integrators send whatever they know about a project. If the supplied information is enough, ADI’s design team aims to return a system design the same day. If details are missing, the team sets up a short call to talk through the scope in more detail.
Deeply Experienced Team Members
The result is a bill of materials (BOM) delivered as a quote for products that can easily be purchased on the ADI website. The service does not include advanced system line drawings, which are the next tier up, but the team will provide an initial sketch or explain the design by email, drawing from a full range of residential and commercial expertise. Indeed, the design team members are CTS-D certified, and their commercial designs run from complex meeting rooms to bars, restaurants and gyms. They are fully adept with advanced systems from QSC, Shure and other ADI-distributed brands, as well as ADI-exclusive brands like Control4.
On the residential side, it would be natural to assume that networking is the obvious driver of demand. Normand, however, says, “Actually, it’s lighting.”
Control4’s latest lighting control solutions support more advanced designs. And for projects like those, ADI’s designers can provide drawings with marked-up floor plans.
Buy the SKUs in the morning
ADI’s professional services take things a step further. ADI sells five professional-service offerings: certified system line drawings, control system programming, audio DSP programming, advanced GUI development and remote site support.
According to Normand, the push for professional services largely came from ADI’s supplier partners. “A lot of [them were] saying, ‘You guys need to do this. We have tons of pent-up business,’“ he recalls.
Reinforcing the industrywide appetite, ADI already has a significant number of projects completed in the last few months.
The typical entry point is engineer-signed line drawings; integrators can supply their own or simply have ADI produce them. Often, the design team specs the service SKUs directly into a design so that integrators can order programming hours the same way that they order hardware.
The ADI professional-services team can complete all its work remotely. For site support, a TeamViewer computer is set up at the jobsite, and ADI loads the code, tweaks the DSP and confirms that the system works. Normand reinforces the team’s deep subject-matter expertise, saying its members program Q-SYS, Control4, AMX, RTI and other platforms. Indeed, one ADI programmer has passed the highest Q-SYS certification available.
Speed and the absence of friction
Another key factor? Speed and the absence of friction. Normand strives to keep the process as simple as possible. He notes that integrators don’t have to request a custom quote or scope of work. Instead, they can buy the SKUs on ADI’s website, send in the purchase-order confirmation and programming can start that very day.
Describing what that looks like in practice, Normand says, “So, you can…literally buy the SKUs in the morning and have the code on your desk by the end of the day. [Then, you can] send a tech out to the jobsite the next day, and we’ll load it in the system.”
Improving the value proposition even further, ADI’s professional-services rates are competitive.
Asked about homeowners who give up on control systems in favor of phone apps after suffering through bad experiences, Normand says the quality of a system comes down to the programming. A client can invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, but it really falls on one person to make everything work harmoniously.
ADI Professional Services: Complementary, not competitive
ADI takes pains to reassure its integrator partners that its suite of services is about integrator support and enablement — never about competition. And the education is ongoing as ADI further expands its offerings. The task now, Normand says, is to get integrators to try ADI’s design services and professional services and see that they are complementary to in-house capabilities.
“I’ve been in this industry too long to even think for a second that I want to be taking your jobs,” Normand declares. ADI, he affirms, has no desire to be in the integrator business. “We’re not touching ceiling tiles. We’re not touching racks. We’re not — and we never will.”
That clarity of mission should set integrators’ minds at ease, while reminding them that, at a time of labor-market tightness and technician shortages, value-added distributors like ADI can give integrators a helping hand. And that help goes well beyond pick, pack and ship.
