I have now finished the last week in pre-sales, and it is already been almost three months since I started my placement! Following by the first ever responsibility I have taken officially in pre-sales last week, I have also been into a site-survey (the client turned up this time haha!) for a new coming up project. Finally doing some reviews with the supervisors for my next period of placement allocation. Now let’s take a look at my last but not the least, busy week in pre-sales!
While producing the proposal, apart from writing down what kind of solutions and equipment that we are going to provide as a company, we also need to list out clearly what are needed at client’s side which is called dependencies or prerequisites. The importance of putting down every detail for the prerequisites is to make sure we only cover the job that is listed in the proposal without spending extra budgets on the things that should be provided on site. For instances, the ceiling should be supported up to a certain weight, there should be enough power supply on site and all the other things such as disposal of the legacy equipment or chemical waste. While writing up the system solution summaries, apart from writing down the description of each systems, the reason of knowing the whole system well is to consider every component that should be included in the clients’ dependencies lists.
What I did was drawing out the entire system with all their connection and power supply required, in that case I can get a rough idea on what to be included in the prerequisites lists. However, due to the difference of each different rooms and locations, dependencies will always need to be reviewed and changed. However, it is always important and useful to clarify the whole system and I found out it is easier for me to understand a system from the beginning.
In addition to producing the solution summary, I visited the Barclays office for their coming up auditorium refurbished project. The auditorium including basic conference room features, event space audio and video presentation and a central control room. The reasons of physically going on site instead of just looking at the schematics is to understand the room even better and getting more details from the client side in order to fulfil their requirements. We looked at the current equipment and quite a lot of them needed to display since their functionality was no longer enough to support the current needs; some of the displays are burnt and flashing etc. Apart from clarify the replacement of the kits, it is also important that we get a chance to see if the current rack is capable for changes and get to know if the network bandwidth is enough or not. Since there is an AV technician on their site so we can get to ask some in-depth technical questions before making the design.
But in most of the case, while on site you can always end up with talking to an IT staff who know nothing or very less in terms of AV, which might make the design even more difficult. How lucky I am is to go into a site-survey with experienced AV technician, along with a project that basically cover up everything that might include in a AV industry project. It was definitely a very nice opportunity for me to have a look at how a pre-sales engineer approach to a project in the very first stage and get to know the tiny details that I have to clarify when visiting on site.
Finishing off at pre-sales with this site-survey and I will be going to PE next week! Personally, I think it was a bit shame that I couldn’t took on more jobs and responsibilities while I was in pre-sales. Which is because this role required more products knowledge and design experiences. But I still enjoyed my time when I was in pre-sales and I cannot wait to go into another new department next week to get more challenges. That is it for my diary in pre-sales and I will see you next week in PE!
Mandy xx
