‘No man is an island. Entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent. A part of the main.” Poet John Donne got it right back in 1624. You can be sure that he wasn’t writing about high tech, critical communications ecosystems, but his words have a powerful resonance with what we are doing at SCT. We are strongly connected to our end-users. They rely on our technology to keep their engineers and passengers safe and put a lot of trust in us and our products. That’s why we put so much emphasis on a quality-driven approach for our remote condition monitoring technology.
But it’s not only our end-customers we are strongly connected to. Other businesses in our sectors are a key part of our continent, our ‘main’. We partner with many different organisations such as the tier 1 contractors who look after renewal contracts for the likes of Network Rail and TfL. Also switches and crossings manufacturers who can combine our SWIX and Smart Washer products within their overall solutions. We work with systems integrators and critical communications providers to the rail, oil, gas, renewables, and mining markets, as well as those offering maintenance solutions where our products and services can really make a difference. In fact, there’s a whole ecosystem of businesses all highly connected, hyperconnected if you like, to ensure the highest levels of maintenance, safety, and critical communications.
Quality is the glue that binds
That’s why our focus on quality extends to our partnerships. We need partnerships with complementary businesses to take our leading products and services into new markets. Aside from our own commercial aspirations, and every business has them, it’s important to us that everyone working in industries where there’s a high-risk of safety incidents is protected. Our IoT technology is designed to protect people and equipment. It provides a heightened level of security and safety that identifies potential problems before they become dangerous. Safety shouldn’t be restricted to a particular country or a certain industry. Everyone should have access to it. Our partners play a vital role in bringing our products into new markets. We hand-pick business partners who know their sector and understand the value of critical communications. And, importantly, we invest in their knowledge, spending time training and working alongside them, especially in new markets, to ensure that they fully represent our business goals and ethos.
It's not one-way traffic
To misquote Eleanor Roosevelt, partnership ‘is a two-way street’. (She actually said ‘understanding’ rather than ‘partnership’, which still works.) Like all relationships, business partners both bring benefits and the whole is ultimately greater than the sum of its parts. Our partners invest their time and effort in getting to know our products and understand how they apply in their markets or industries. They bring in-depth knowledge of the processes within their countries – from procurement processes to import and export regulations. They know and understand the critical communications challenges that their customers’ face, which are usually the same as those SCT’s existing customers have faced. There’s often a lot of commonality across sectors, which means that our partners can showcase the benefits that the likes of the UK’s rail networks have seen from implementing SCT’s SWIX and Smart Washer technology. Sometimes even making connections or introductions between UK network operators, for example, and their counterparts elsewhere in the world.
Listening is (again) key
The strength of our listening approach comes into its own when it comes to our working partnerships. We listen to partners every bit as intensely as we listen to our customers. We adapt and learn from them the whole time, and we work together in a collaborative way. Ultimately, it’s all about extending the reach and the impact of our solutions to benefit those at risk: protecting equipment from damage and, most importantly, protecting people from harm.
The strength of our partnerships is a major asset. We are keen to expand the range and scope of our partner ecosystem and choose resellers that complement our IoT-based solutions. If you think your business could be a good fit, please do get in touch. You’ll find details of who we work with here and contact us at info@smartcomptech.com. We’d be very happy to talk with (and listen to) you.