Innovolt on a Mission to Eliminate Power-Related Service Calls

Jun Ho Son

Innovolt, a leading manufacturer of power protection products, caught the industry’s attention on September 1 when it announced the hiring of Ed McLaughlin and Phil Boatman as the company’s vice-chairman and president, respectively. Both were well known in the office imaging space; McLaughlin is the former president of Sharp Imaging and Information company, and Boatman held several senior-level sales and marketing positions at Lexmark.

ENX Magazine recently had a chance to speak with Boatman and Innovolt CEO Jun Ho Son about the company, its new management team, and the market potential for its power protection products.

The addition of McLaughlin and Boatman are already having a positive impact, according to Son. “Having Phil and Ed has really helped open doors for us and foster conversations,” he said.
Those conversations are important, because Innovolt takes a very different approach to power protection. That requires some discussion around the very real differences and how they drive meaningful results against what’s out there in the market today.

Phil Boatman

That includes power sags where the voltage drops below normal for a short period of time. Problems caused by sags are often mistaken to have other causes, and that can create headaches and lost time for service organizations and their customers. Innovolt offers the only device-level protection against sags, which the company says represent about 75 percent of all power-related issues.

Boatman believes that this gives Innovolt a compelling story for dealers, because power protection focused only on spikes or surges is redundant with what’s built into equipment power supplies. “Basic surge protection is a technology that’s been around for a long long time,” said Boatman. ”But without fail every dealer or partner that I’ve spoken with over the last couple of months has told me pretty much the same thing: They’re still looking for an edge. Any kind of edge. They want to be able to demonstrate a greater value to their customers and they want to understand how they can become more efficient as an organization.”

The edge that Boatman believes Innovolt’s products provide is more reliable equipment in the field and greater service efficiency. “That’s why I’m so excited coming on board here. There’s so much opportunity for us to to work with the dealers out there and provide them something that nobody else has,” he said.

According to evaluations with customers, a dealer can save anywhere from 20 to over 40 percent on service calls by eliminating faults caused by these power anomalies. “That doesn’t mean you necessarily let go of a big portion of your tech service reps,” said Son. “It can also mean you can add business without adding headcount.” A service tech that had been able to manage 100 machines might now be able to do 150. “Everyone is dealing with retaining customers,” Boatman added. “A customer whose equipment goes down two times a week might drop [the dealer]. The real meat of it is when [dealers] look at their entire fleets that they’re maintaining and see how we can drive some pretty substantial benefits.”

Breakdown of power issue disturbances

Dealers and their customers don’t have to take Innovolt’s claims on faith alone. The company offers cloud-based reporting based on power data its products collect. This allows service techs to quickly identify or rule out power issues as the cause of an equipment failure. “The worst case [for a service tech] is to come back after two or three visits for the same problem after trying a lot of things and then telling the customer, ‘we think it’s a power problem,’” said Son. It also validates having the products in place as both dealers and customers have a record of all power issues that occurred.

The company offers power protection options for everything from small standalone units to production machines. “[Dealers] generally keep the pricing of those things at around 10 percent of the actual equipment,” said Son. “So part of the challenge for us was to make sure that we were able to actually present customers with an option to remain economically viable at lower [equipment] price points.”

For 2017, Innovolt looks to grow both its dealer channel and customer base. Son said the company will continue to develop its analytics capabilities. “We want to underscore how the data can be used by technicians,” he said, adding that he expected Innovolt to provide more data points in a more practical format. “People will apply new technologies in ways and situations that they understand,” said Son. “[Analytics] can be a really substantial differentiator, but only if you make it easily accessible and easy to apply to what they do today.”