The Right way to buy B2B Technology
Buying technology for your company in a B2B context is very different from spending your own money as a consumer. After all, you probably won’t anger your spouse with a poor B2B purchase, but you might just get yourself fired (and good luck with your spouse at that point!)
Many factors come into play when you evaluate technology for your company. The initial purchase price is - surprisingly - pretty far down the list. Let’s take a look at the key things you must consider before you buy:
Start With Products That Solve Your Problem Completely
Whatever solution you’re considering has to fully address the problem at hand. This one’s so obvious that most companies do a decent job at it. Companies develop a checklist of hard requirements and eliminate any considered products that are missing something.
However, just checking off a list could be a missed opportunity. What many people neglect to do here is to identify the opportunity to REALLY solve multiple problems. If you’re going to buy a box that does one thing, what else could it do for you? Think broadly, and then look for semi-custom manufacturers that might solve problems that off-the-shelf devices can’t.
Add Installation Costs to Your Purchase Price
This is the first place that I see a lot of people get tripped up. Remember that you’re never truly buying a piece of technology for your business. You’re buying the end result or the solution it provides. That could be a secure network, raw materials that are correctly processed, situational awareness of a remote location, or any other important goal.
Until you cross the finish line, the price tag is climbing. That’s why it’s so foolish to think only about the dollars you put on your PO.
How much will it cost, in time and added fees, to get this thing installed?
Don’t Forget Training and Support
Buying a product and getting it installed is just the first step. Now, you actually have to use it.
To learn how to use any new gear, you need a few key elements:
- Intuitive UI and menus
- Quality documentation
- Solid training (possibly recorded but preferably live)
- Tech support from people who actually know something.
Each of these elements is important in its own way, and most relate to saving labor time and staff frustration. You need to factor each of these into your total price figure. You might just find that the “expensive” solution that includes some of these things for free actually ends up being the cheapest long-term option.
Intuitive UI and Menus
If you buy something with intuitive UI and menus, that pays dividends every day. If you’re using an entirely intuitive device, it won’t matter how good the documentation or the training is. You’ll never need it!
Quality Documentation
Sadly, we live in the real world with complex challenges, so it’s rarely possible to make a tool that’s 100% intuitive. Powerful tools have at least some inherent complexity.
That’s why you should evaluate the quality of manufacturer documentation that’s available before you buy anything. That will likely be your first stop when something doesn’t make sense.
Solid Training
For big-ticket items with a lot of capabilities, cracking open a 200-page user guide isn’t a great idea. You should be able to get access to richer training, like live events. These are just plain easier to understand for most people, even if you have to cover the same amount of material.
But what’s so great about live training, whether in a small group or you pay for a private session, is that you can tailor it to your needs.
Sure, you might buy a central monitoring server from a company like mine that can work with 30+ protocols, but you’re probably only using a few of those in your network. Why waste time learning the ones you won’t use? That’s the real advantage of live, customized training. You get the same benefit without wasting any time.
Tech Support From People who Know Something
No matter how intuitive a product is, how good the manual is, or how much training you received, you’re going to run into at least some headaches as you get going. Who will be there to get you back on track?
Everybody has a tech support horror story to share. We all know the feeling of talking to someone who is reading the same web FAQ you already read before calling.
Look for two major factors to identify good support:
- Is it provided by engineers who are actually experts?
- If you can find it, software developers who also pick up the support phone are, by definition, the most knowledgeable people to answer your questions
- Is it priced reasonably or even included with your purchase?
- I see an alarming number of companies who seem to sell their gear at cost and then try to make it up with ridiculous support fees. That’s a terrible trap to fall into. Look for free or inexpensive support.
The Other Piece of the Equation: Long Equipment Life
If you’ve been in this game a while, I’m sure you’ve found yourself thinking: “Is this all going to change? Will I have to buy something else in two years?”
At larger companies and government agencies, you may have seen gear that becomes obsolete before you can even install it.
This is the other piece of the equation determining your purchasing success: How long is your purchase going to function? You’ve worked hard on everything up until this point to invest in the right solution and get it operational. Now, how many years of useful life will it give you?
There are several components involved here:
1. Look for low Failure Rates
Obviously, whatever you buy is useless after a failure. Look for manufacturers that perform aggressive testing on their designs. Remember also that a history of similar designs helps to guarantee the reliability of semi-custom products built with you in mind.
2. Plan for a Changing World
There’s only so much you can do here. Anything you buy today will eventually become a dinosaur, but you can influence how long that takes. If a new communications standard is taking hold in your industry, look for gear that supports both the new and old standards. That way, you’re covered for many years—and you can make a graceful transition at your desired pace.
3. You Need Product Availability for 10 Years or More
Whether it’s for sparing or expansion, you need long-term access to buy more units in small volumes. Changing to a different solution because you can’t get more units is painful, and it happens a lot. Look for a manufacturer with a solid track record and the willingness to guarantee the long-term availability of your chosen gear.
Your Secret Weapon: a Small, Agile Manufacturer With a Proven History
As I’ve mentioned a few times so far, there’s value in choosing a manufacturer who will create semi-custom products for you. You can get a perfect fit that just isn’t possible with off-the-shelf designs.
Unless you work for a truly massive entity with deep pockets, semi-custom is probably only going to come from a smaller manufacturer.
Don’t think for a minute, however, that I’m telling you to look for a few guys working out of a basement somewhere (although that could be how they started!)
You’re looking for a supplier in the “Goldilocks Zone.” They should be small and agile but still big enough to give you a quality product, excellent support, and long-term availability.
If you follow this path, it’s likely that your chosen manufacturer (who has done this kind of thing a lot more than you have) will suggest valuable enhancements to your project specs. These are ways to multiply the power of the solution that you would not have thought of on your own. That’s a huge advantage that a small, agile, and experienced manufacturer gives you.
“What’s the Catch?”
When I talk about the benefits of choosing a small, agile manufacturer like DPS (or our peers in other sectors), I get some common objections. A lot of people assume that there must be a catch hidden somewhere.
Similarly, I’m sometimes regarded as a bit of an alien when I talk to other CEOs. They can’t fathom why I would run my own PCB manufacturing or (especially!) my own metal shop, and they certainly don’t see how I can do it profitably.
Admittedly, the business model can be daunting for the uninitiated. As a manufacturer, pulling this off is trickier than it sounds, but it’s not impossible. There are several things I do to increase my ability to deliver for my clients.
First, I build a top-notch team. That involves insulating product engineers from you— my clients—until they’ve proven themselves in extensive job interviews and intensive multi-month “boot camps.” I don’t want somebody on my team writing a bug into a device that’s on top of a mountain under 15 feet of snow, and I KNOW you don’t want that.
Second, I direct my engineers to build modular circuits and code. When you need something special, like an RTU that can handle Modbus protocol, we don’t start from scratch. My goal is to take 80% from an off-the-shelf device and add what you need. That accelerates your delivery and bakes in the reliability of existing designs.
Finally, the very act of customizing equipment, again and again, means that you get good at it. At my company, an entire culture of common phrases has evolved to keep people in the right mindset for this type of work. Those are some of the most important things we teach new engineers who join the team.
You can Make a Great Choice, no Matter What You’re Buying
If you need remote monitoring gear for your sites, that’s awesome. Give my team at DPS a call.
No matter what you’re looking for, the general principles I’ve discussed here will work for any B2B technology purchase.
Even if you’ll never need the gear we build at DPS, you can make a better purchase decision by calculating the full cost of ownership, choosing a reliable manufacturer, and exploring the huge benefits of customized equipment.