Hi guys it’s another weekly update for my placement phase 2 in pre-sales department! Following by the visit to Shure last Friday, we have another manufacturer came in for some products introduction again. Also, some more exciting job came to me this week, so stay tuned and keep reading!
大家好！又是到了每個禮拜的實習洲際更新時間了，而今天是在pre-sales的第二個禮拜～ 繼上禮拜前往Shure參觀，這禮拜也有不同的製造商來公司裡做了產品展示。還有就是我開始接了一些事務了！！所以廢話不多說繼續愈看下去吧～
At the beginning of this week, I got a chance to go into a site-survey, which is for a conference room refurbishment in London. What pre-sales engineers do in a site-survey is basically doing some detailed measurements in the room and checking of there is any other issue that will clash with the design in the future that can be put into consideration. Not just the dimension of the room, the lighting, sight of view and the acoustic design in the room is also included during a site-survey. Most importantly, by going on-site and meet the client/end user will give the pre-sales engineers a better view of the functionality in the rooms and get some more further information from the clients to build up a fully functional room design that satisfied their requirements. Well, but things didn’t go as we expected. I went into the clients’ site with my colleges and waited in the reception for the site contact to show up and bring us to the current conference room – for a good 30 minutes. As you can expect… yes the client did NOT turn up. Turned out our client site contact didn’t inform anyone in the company that we will be visiting on the day to do the site-survey. Furthermore, the conference room that we are supposed to look at has already been booked out throughout the day, and there were a meeting going on while we were there. So it wasn’t a very pleased site-survey for my first visit, but anything could always happened so sometimes you’ll just have to accept it haha.
Although the site-survey doesn’t go quite well, I went into the Extron office the next day to get some products overview and introduction. Extron is a manufacturer company that start up with making AV switchers and processors and slowly reached out to cover control interfaces etc. On the day to Extron, I have been introduced to the basic products that a AV dealer like ourselves will purchased and their features. One of their Extron specified technology was the scaler, it can allow a smooth transition between large and small images without any quality loss and delays. A specialist central interface can be control on a network to modify the outputs. Apart from the switcher and processor, I have also got a short demos of different ceiling speakers that various from their coverage areas/angles. As a pre-sales engineers, getting a decent understanding on the products is a key while making the designs. By going to these several trainings and demo sessions helps a lot for me to get familiar to a wide range of products and slowly build up the background of the AV system methodology.
What you can see from my previous articles for placement, since I am still a rookie that has a very little understanding of what the industry is doing what I did in the first 2 months are basically shadowing and training. To be honest, sometimes it could be a bit boring and seeing the other senior colleges who are busy with their projects does make me feel bad for not able to contribute some works. The good news for this week is – I finally got allocated to some jobs! Some of you might remembered that the core job for the pre-sales department did is to produce a job calc for the project. As I am not that experienced to produce a job calc just by looking at the functionality of the room to make a design, my manager allocated me some basic projects that the job calc are based on the previous works for me to refer to. I think no matter what kind of job that you are doing, the more that you look into and get familiar with, the more understanding and comfortable you will get from the job. Before looking into the previous works that have some similar designs, my manager has explained and guided me through the whole job calc for the room functionality and some signal flows which make me understand the whole job calc even more clearly. Thanks to that, I was able to make a few job calc that was referred from some previous design. While producing those job calc, I have to considered what processors or switchers that will allow the signals to flow, something smaller to an adapter is also included. By doing so, I am getting familiar with some common products and build the background of how to build an initial design at the same time.
Although it was just a simple job that is based on some previous design, I am still feeling very excited to be allocated to be involved in some projects. I would say it is a very good sign as being in a department in week two to get some responsibility in terms of getting involved with projects, and I believed there will be some more works that I can get involved and learned from!
It is soon that I will be going to the 3rd week in pre-sales department from next week, time does actually fly! At the same time next week, don’t forget to come back and check out my latest updates for my placement records. I will see you all there!
Mandy xx
