EES Blog

Blog post by Bruce Marson, President, Engineered Energy Solutions

I guess the old saying “what goes around, comes around” if you wait long enough, is true in the controls industry as well. We had for many years, a large telecommunications client for whom we had installed PLC-based building controls in the late eighties. The client was forward thinking in regards to the energy consumed by their 2.2 million square-foot R&D facility. Having the innovative corporate culture that fueled hundreds of patents per year, they recognized the rewards we were offering with our new (at the time) PLC-based energy control system. Back in the day, no one was applying PLCs to central utility plants and major air handling systems like we were and after a review of the numbers, they took a chance. After completing the installation, we saved them $500,000 per year with a return on investment in under two years.  When the project ultimately lead to the customer winning an award from the State of New Jersey for energy management, we had a client for life.  

To advise our clients, suppliers and business partners of where we are, plan to go, and how we are handling this unprecedented crisis. 

First, we hope that all of our clients, suppliers, partners and your families are well.

To our clients:

We are coping with this situation with our full complement of engineers and technicians.  Working on projects where allowed, remote monitoring to all existing clients, and advising of any issues.

When one of EES' clients decided to do a capital upgrade of large motors, they planned to reuse the motor protection system that was in place. Our client was of the mindset that spending the additional money to replace the motor protection system that was still working was not necessary. Working as an advocate for our client, EES successfully argued that replacing the motor protection controllers at the same time would be an investment well spent. As is the case for many older controllers in the field today, the only way to get repair parts on old units is through a used/refurbished market. In addition to difficult part sourcing, this could cause unwanted extended downtime for our client.

EES had our client’s long-term well-being in mind and was able to convince them of the value and wisdom of upgrading the obsolete control system with Allen-Bradley’s newest technology for overload protection, the E300™ (networked) Electronic Overload Relays.

A picture is worth 1,000 words – right? Our founder, Pat Miller, thought so when he came up with this visual years ago to capture in a picture what our company does, and the benefits customers can realize by leveraging our unique expertise and services. Well, his marketing genius did not work in the above case, but it did gather a lot of attention and questions from those who saw it or those with a ‘?’ on their face! To introduce our blog, we decided to document our historical marketing attempt by bringing our elephant story back to life with an explanation to pay tribute to our founder’s creative efforts.