TSS adds software to the menu

TREVOSE, Pa.-As a veteran of global integrator SST, John Nemerofsky, president of TSS International, feels integrators' pain. His firm began as a recruitment venture, putting the right people in the right jobs, but as he spoke and consulted with more integrators, big and small, he found they had other consistent problems. They couldn't train and retain sales people. They couldn't estimate and propose jobs correctly and in a timely fashion. They couldn't track successes and failures in a way that was instructive. So TSS got into the software business. The company has launched WeSuite, a collection of software offerings based on SQL databases and .net structures that are intended to serve as business operation aids designed specifically for the security integration business. The first to hit the market is WeEstimate, estimating sales and proposal management software that TSS executives said will reduce the average proposal generation time from as much as three or four hours to as little as 30 minutes. Further, it will help integrators keep things like hours-per-product-installation consistent from job to job and make it more likely that a job will come in on-budget and on-time. "Integrators are bleeding labor," said TSS vice president Sam Vinicur. "When we talk to them about standardizing their bids so they can keep a better track of how much their labor costs, they understand. Then, when we'd follow up, we'd find they had nowhere to put the new process." This software allows an integrator, for example, to drag and drop all the parts associated with a job into a folder associated with a bid. Each product has a price and a margin associated with it, along with a time for installation. Once all the parts are in the folder, a push of a button gets you an estimate that can be augmented with costs for travel, subcontractor costs, and plenty more. Each bid can then be associated with a sales person, and a manager can track each sales person's successful and unsuccessful bids, with notes for why bids were and were not successful. " The lost business report is very important," said Vinicur. "If you start noticing patterns in why you're not getting jobs you can correct things. Most integrators never look at the lost jobs." ssn