Time to do some updates on week 3 in pre-sales! Time flies that it has already been half a month since I was in pre-sales. Following by getting the small tasks that I have done last week, there is another approach of work for me to crack on this week. Again, if you are ready, let’s dig into my placement world!
Well, Monday was busy as usual that pre-sales engineers started to get all these projects coming in in the beginning of the morning, and there was a nightmare that I bet most of the pre-sales engineers wouldn’t generally like it, which is a “Tender project”. As you can tell from its name, “tender” is the project before our company win and sell it out. It is at the stage of bidding and compete with other AV companies. We all love new opportunities and big project but not when it wasn’t be giving with enough information! So, the tender project we came across this week was a multifunction space that involved with all sorts of different AV technologies. However, when our engineers went to the meeting to clarify the functionality of each room before starting the design, the client side didn’t quite clear and sure what they want their rooms to perform. This did cause quite a big issue since it was difficult for the pre-sales engineers to do the design to meet their requirement, since the clients themselves don’t know what they’re looking for! But there it is, you never know what kind of clients that you will be pump into. At the same time, there are always some regular daily basis project that the pre-sales engineers need to deal with, so yah basically a nightmare. We still managed to crack on and finish the design for this tender project initially, which is obviously not the most efficient and worthy job that we could do. But for me to get a chance to look at such a complicated system did make me to learn quite a lot from it. Take a look at my fantastic drawing! (No, it’s not my design lol, I am just a ghost drawer)
After finishing with the tender project, the new responsibilities I got in pre-sales department was writing up a summaries/proposal! As I mentioned several times that the pre-sales engineers’ main job contents are doing the initial design, producing a job calc and proposal, I will now be starting to produce my own proposal for a newly developed portal called streamline. Within several enterprise clients that we have in our company, most of our project are to design a conference room, will almost everyone of them to be honest. Since the enterprise clients have their own standard and layout when building their branches all around the world, the video conference room layout is pretty much the same. Instead of starting a new design when we get a project from the enterprise clients every time, we are now building up a portal for them to choose different types of the conference room systems to speed up the design stage and improve our efficiency. Therefore, my role in this portal team is to write up a summary for each conference systems so that the client can understand and make decisions while they are choosing on the portal. Which I would say it is a perfect practice for me to get a depth knowledge on how each system to write up a summary. The system that we commonly used for the general conference room including Crestron zoom, Logitech Tap, Crestron Flex, Lenovo Thinkhub, Surface Hub and Cisco. There are also different solutions for different room types as well for me to understand to write up a summary for each one of them. Here is comes the challenging and responsibility for my placement job after two months!
Since I haven’t came across with any of these system or even only just have a slight look at them, I have to learn how each system connected with each other and how it works in the room on by one, which I spent quite a time in researching before the write up. Especially in putting all the designs in the conference into a general, easy-understandable terms to the clients. Well, another challenge in my formal English phrasing again. But I think the more you look into these systems, you will find out that the layout and design are all pretty similar, just some replacement of the kits using the same methodology. Although I did struggle a bit trying to get my head around on all the different systems at the first time, but I will say it wasn’t a very difficult first responsibility job that I took on. During the process of researching or even draw myself out the schematic, I got to understand the system more and get a deeper product knowledge as well. Almost finished my first draft in all the solution summaries, and I am now waiting for some feedback from my college. Hopefully everything will turn out to be alright and got my work abilities proved not just sitting around people as a placement student!!
Finishing with the new responsibility that I have taken on this week, there should be more exciting stuff for me to see in my last week in pre-sales. I will see you next week again with my final week in pre-sales, bye!
Mandy xx
