What a great trip to Las Vegas for #NACS2015! Thankfully we didn’t stay at the hotel where the Presidential Debate occurred – that would have added a lot of chaos to what is already a pretty busy event in an even busier city. We did have a good time – nibbling and snacking on all those delightful foods, too. The snacking and nibbling was offset by the sheer size of the Las Vegas Convention Center – we easily got in our 10k steps every day. There was just that much to see…
And we did see a lot of great things at NACS this year. A quick nod to our really nice (and busy!) booth mates on either side of us – Acumera on the one side and CStorePro (who were using Povelli products to help demonstrate their system) on the other side. Seriously, they were busy talking to people the entire show, as were we. Like we said – a great show.
We saw quite a few new things in the New Product areas, and in some cases we got to try food that just hasn’t quite made it into our region yet – the lines at Krispy Krunchy Chicken were long and for good reason (great chicken!). We noticed this year a much more active Latin American and South American presence. It was nice to see so many international visitors to this conference, and although they may have been there in force last year, it just seemed more noticeable this year.
Speaking of international visitors, we were selected for an interview with Petrol Plaza, and we’re excited to see how that turns out. We met them the first day of NACS when they came by the booth to educate us about the Uniti Expo next year. Some of our new international friends mentioned it was a great expo and worth checking out. With our travel costs for next year reduced a bit due to NACS 2016 coming to Atlanta, it’s still open for discussion and more importantly, there’s still time to fit it in the budget for 2016.
Budgets are a big deal this year, and in the maintenance resource planning business, they’re a big deal every year. We heard a lot from people who had some pretty central themes to tracking their maintenance – how to track their maintenance without having to do double-entry into two systems and how to make sure they weren’t paying for maintenance they didn’t need. Central to our software is the idea that managers and the finance department want to track all aspects related to maintenance – the people doing maintenance, how much it costs and how long it takes to fix things.
Here are just a few of the recurring questions we heard:
- Our vendor doesn’t have access to our current work order system, making it hard to figure out what was done and creating more work for employees who have to key it in.
- Is it possible to take a picture of the invoice and have it load into the CMMS system?
- Our main focus is accountability – is there a reporting feature that will help with that?
- We’re looking for something with a checklist that could help us prevent excess trip charges from outside vendors.
- Is there a way to indicate the work order is regarding a piece of equipment that if it’s not working we lose money on (ie revenue generating equipment as opposed to a toilet leaking)?
- We’d like to be able to take a picture of the invoice and add it to the system.
In the event you were curious about the answers to these questions, it’s yes.
All in all, NACS was a good, fun show (again) and we look forward to seeing everyone in Atlanta at #NACS2016!