Vidir Vertical Storage Solutions 

Vidir News

Now this is huge because of the reliability of the machines compared to Hanel or Remstar. Think about a company, Vidir, who has tens of thousands of units in public places like Home Depot and Lowes and these units never go down. I mean, have you ever been in a Lowes or Home Depot and seen a unit down? i haven’t! 

Not only are Vidir VLM’s reliable but they are supported by the manufacturers service team on a nationwide basis. 

With Hanel and Remstar you are replying on the dealer you purchase from and technicians come and go much more quickly than they ever have. So you buy today, and the dealer has a great technicians or two, but next month they are gone. It takes years to gain the knowledge to do proper maintenance on these units. Vidir has developed a system to keep so many units up and running in Home Depots and Lowes. 

The 1000 foot view of Vidir’s VLM.

 This lift is going to be most similar to a Hianel VLM. So module is a little bit different. Hanel is using belts. Vidir uses a chain and sprocket system. This is a heavier duty. A bit more robust. It’s really in line with with that handle unit. It was designed more so off that handle unit and it was designed as big and robust and with the chains because eventually the the secret to it will be doing two £2,500 trays. Right now, it’s offered at £601,000 trays and eventually that’ll get beefed up and we’ll be able to put different product on there. Vidir has a real soft we have that we have the market cornered for £1,000 and below and then we have an HD carousel that will hold £2,000. And then anything between 2005 thousand is a problem. 

So typically what we would do is if we have customer that has like £3,200 or £3,000 or even £2,500 per position, we end up selling them or quoting them at least a vertical lift system for sheet metal or bar stock. That’s usually way overkill, 280,000. And it just not even in the budget and the conversation ends. So the goal will be to beef this unit up structurally it can support it. We just have to beef up the elevator and get those extra weights out of it. And this will kind of be that middle, middle part where it’s too heavy for a carrousel, it’s too light for 300,000 machine. So this will kind of be that sweet spot. But for now, it’s at 1006 hundred. We’ll get into it. This has been two years. We’ve been building them for two years now. 

Companies we work with pretty closely in the past, local companies.

Companies we have good relationships with. We sold them units at cost, installed them and have been beta testing those units and then did a year of that. And then this year it was released to dealers slowly and hopefully by the end of this year, all of our dealers that want to be on board are on board and have know the machine and have some leads working. So this is part of getting you guys trained unlike like where we would do a wire carousel and someone would try to bid against you. 

There will be absolutely no bidding against each other both ways. So obviously direct we won’t and through reps we won’t either. So if you have something registered or you have a lead that you think is going to become a lead, or you made a call or you send
them an email with literature, whatever it is, send me an email right away. Give me the company name and the zip code.

I don’t need the contact name or their number or anything like that.

Just give me the company name that you want to register in the zip code and I will register you under BLM. And then in four months and six months in a year, if someone comes back from Stanley or Southwest Solutions and they’re trying to register that lead with you, it’s it’s really it’s safe. You don’t have to worry about it. So if you take anything away from today, take that. Make sure if you have somebody that you think’s interested or even if you do a real soft proposal to them or just talk about it with them and you want to register it, send me their name, send me the zip code and I’ll get it registered for you in our system. Great.

The problem that we’re having is like so Stanley Vidmar will sell a couple hundred modular units a year and Bradford Systems in Chicago sells a bunch of them and Patterson Pope down south sells a bunch of HINO units a year. 

Pretty much like a unit. If you’re looking at it, I’ll focus. It’s like, it’s good. You guys are already sold VMC have a pretty good idea. But it’s instead of being on a chain path, obviously it’s moving vertically and horizontally. Your elevator’s going up and pulling from the side. Separate motors do both of those actions. The one thing that we’re that we really want you to hit on is we’re using servo motors on the system. So very fast motors, really accurate motors. Servo motors are kind of like plasma TVs where in 2009, if you bought a plasma TV, it was $3,000 and it weighed £200. And now the technology’s been out there. They’ve worked on it, revised it. Now you can buy a flat screen TV for $500. That’s £40. That’s sort of how the servo market’s going. 

When they first came out, they were super, super expensive.

Nobody was using them because it was just drove the cost so high. There’s still a little bit more expensive. But because that technology’s gotten better and better, they’re within reach. Now we figure eventually all the manufacturers will switch to that servo motor. They’ll have to redesign the unit, but they’ll switch and eventually we’ll redesign carousels to run on servo motors as well, just longer lasting, faster, more accurate motor. So all of these units will go out the door with that. All of the units will also have light curtains. All of the units will also have this LCD screen right here, and all the units will also get the software. So as where a lot of our care sells, you add that software and it’s an upcharge and the light curtains, it kind of gets expensive ad and all that stuff. This system, as it’s quoted, it’s going to have all that included.

So it looks like you can do it with or without skins.

Is that true? That’s that’s just showing. So you can get a good look at the inside. They’re always skinned, but I did just do one. So at a trade show, if you see it at a trade show, it’ll be like Plexiglas skins on the sides just so you can see the actual elevator movement and people can get an idea of what’s going on inside that cube. And I did just have a customer order it with those Plexiglas skins. So it’s an option. 

If they want to see through the unit, we can do it. Cool. And sorry if I’m jumping ahead. No, no, go ahead. It’s great how you guys compare from a price perspective to anal.  Yeah. So we are a less expensive than anal. More expensive than modular. And it’s kind of in that it’s more of a it’s a it’s a more robust unit than modular. So instead of those belts, we’re using chains. 

So we kind of designed it to be that not to directly compete.

I mean, we do directly compete with modular, but it is coming in at a little bit higher price point because it’s a more robust, bigger unit. But so if the selling point against modular would be the the chains and the motors. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 100%. And the real. And we’ll get into it a little bit here, but the serviceability of it. So you guys are familiar with VMM? A lot of times if customers are familiar with Volm and they hear Volm, they get they’re like, 

Oh man, because they’ve had bad experiences. Everybody we talk to, they have ten modular units, they have a bunch of hang on units. Service is never great. Parts are hard to get to and if they go down, they’re down for a while. So we’ve been doing carousels for 30 years and we’ve had customers come back and back and back and say, Guys, we need you to build a V Elm. We’d love for you to build a VM that’s as reliable as your carousels. It took us a while to get to that point and that sort of COVID lull there, that first couple of months gave engineering time to really sit down and figure this out. 

And so now we have a unit that we think is as reliable as our carrier carousels.

So that’s sort of why we we brought it to the table and it’s a feather in the cap like you would have prior years. You would have a customer that you would look at their specs and what they’re trying to store and their ceiling height and their workflow. And you’d say, Man, carousel doesn’t make a ton of sense. You really do need a VLAN and we’d have to send them the modular or anal or card x ramp star. 

So now that we have this, you can start with this. It’s the beautiful thing is you can go into a customer’s facility and say, you know what, a VLAN would be great for you, it’s 130,000 and they go, Oh, I’m looking to spend 6570. Okay, well, we’ll work you down to a pan carousel. If the pan carousel is too expensive, you can drop them all the way down to a shelving carousel. But there’s something for just about every budget for the vertical space. So like curtains are going to be included on every machine standard. Like curtains are tucked in behind the guard right here on either side of the machine. 

They’re tucked in pretty good.

You’d have a heck of a time hitting one or breaking one. We really buried them back there just to get away from the service, cause of someone smack to, like, hurting or something. So they’ll be on every machine height detectors are going to be on every machine too, just like a modular unit or a anal unit. So there’s a beam that gets shot back here that’s not the best X, but there’s a beam in the back of the machine. And every time that carrier or that tray gets sent through that sensor, it’s going to tell the machine the height of your product. So your height is never set. 

Surely it’s 32 inches opening right here. 

So if it’s within 32 inches, it will fit on the machine. The machine will take the measurement and put it away in the correct spot for you. So customers kind of have a hard time understanding that it’s sort of the hardest thing to explain is your positions are never really set, especially if they’re used to carousels, where every carousel has got an 18 inch clear height and a 24 inch depth. So that’s sort of the hardest part to convey to them. 

But once they understand it, it’s a beautiful system.

The HMI screen is going to come on every single unit we sell, so you can’t buy it without it. It’ll come with that. It’ll come with our software. Automatically, you’ll be able to search the machine by part number by product description, and that’s our own software. So if there’s a change they want to make, we’re more than happy to make that for them. Like we’re doing one right now with Walmart where they’re using RFID tags. 

So instead of typing in a log in for the employee to log into that machine, they walk up to the machine, swipe their RFID tag, and it automatically opens the machine for them. 

So because it is our software and we created it, our guys wrote it, we can make those little changes. And like the government Air Force Base, I’m doing a lot of custom software stuff for them. If that comes up, I’ll get their team on the phone, get our team on the phone, we’ll figure out a price to do what they’re asking. 

Sometimes we just throw it in for free. 

If it’s not that crazy for us to rewrite something. Sometimes I’ve got one now where they want to log into the machine with an RFID tag and then they would like a camera to come on and film that process. So if it’s crazy like that, we’ll get it involved and find out the cost. 

But if it’s something simple, it’s no worries. That front facing maintenance access. What they’re talking about here is I’ll zoom in here, this little cutout right here, it’s kind of hard to see. We’ll see it better in another slide further down. But what that does is it’s the electrical control box. So all of your we have all sorts of switches in there, pulses. There’s an MX guard in there. All of that is easily accessible. You’ll power down the machine. This is locked when the machine’s in use because we have a lot of electronics
in there.

But when you’re ready to access that, you’ll power down the Vidir Vertical Storage Solutions machine.

And then this whole thing will slide out. There’s a panel on top, pop the panel off, and you have access to all of that, all that good electronic components. Whereas normally if something goes wrong with the film, it is based in that box. So instead of sort of dismantling the machine and taking a bunch of stuff off, it just slides out and you can pop that off. Another really nice thing about this machine is we partnered with Schneider Electric Components. 

So all of the electronic components in the machine, the sensors, the switches, it’s all from Schneider. I think they have 4000 locations in the North America, so they have a ton of locations. The parts are really accessible and readily accessible. We’ll have it all in Pennsylvania here if we have to send a part out overnight. We definitely can. But even even faster turnaround time, we could tell the customer exactly what part number it is from SCHNEIDER. They can go purchase that themselves.

And a lot of times they can pop that panel off there and plug it in themselves.

And so instead of having it down for the day and having a tech come the next morning, sometimes I just had a customer had for an hour, so they went, they bought the part and they plugged it in. It serves in two purposes. It gets rid of that long lead time and gets rid of the anxiety of not being able to get parts shipped in and the machine being down for a while. So that’s nice. And then it also cuts down on that customer’s cost. So instead of buying a sensor from modular that they bought from Schneider and then marking it up 300% and selling it back to the customer, we can let the customer buy it at Schneider’s cost, and they don’t have to pay any markup on it. And it’s right there. We’re not trying to make money on the service of these machines. 

We’re just trying to sell a Vidir Vertical Storage Solutions machine off the bat. 

So like where some of these companies are charging, I saw I think I saw was on a I think it was a modular quote the other day, but it was 8070 $900 a year for access to their 24/7 support line, which is crazy. We have that 24/7 support line for free. So we’re not trying to make a killing on the back end of this and keeping up after it. We’ll make money when we sell the unit and then hopefully they love the unit, it’s reliable and they buy more units and that’s sort of the business model for it. It’s in here. All of this is going to be pretty similar to competitors. 

The variable tray spacing, it’s within 1.2 inch increments. I think anal has a speed on that. I think they have within one inch increments. Really, really close. No customers ever really get into that chain driven. That’s bonus. Servo motors that’s that’s a bonus. That’s a servo motor moving the elevator up and down and it’s the servo motor moving the trays in and out as well. One piece tray designs. £601,000 capacities. The only difference between that £600 tray and that £1,000 tray is these little sliders are beefed up on the £1,000 tray. And then on the £1,000 tray, you also have these stiffness throughout there.

But the Vidir Vertical Storage Solutions specs of the tray are exactly the same.

Gets you back in here. Auto learning is pretty cool. So just to give you a brief description on that, our IT guy could give you a two hour spiel on that. But auto learning just means that this system is going to recognize habits of the user. So if you’re pulling tray 27 and you’re pulling tray 27, 15 times a day, tray 27 is going to automatically start getting stored at the bottom of the unit. So say that’s Tray 27 and that just keeps it from being up top because it would waste time for it to come all the way down and then present itself. The elevator has much less travel and it just presents that a lot more efficiently. 

So if Tray 27 is getting pulled 15, 20, 30 times a day, it’ll recognize that after two weeks of use, after 14 days of use, and it’ll start doing the math on which trays you’re pulling more frequently, you don’t have to input anything extra just by simply pulling the parts. The machine is going to recognize what your habits are and what you like to do. So that’s that’s auto learning. The inventory control is, like I said, it’s our inventory control. It’s our software.

So if we have to make changes on there, we certainly can do. 

Schneider Electrics, we talked about using their electrical components. The remote service is pretty cool. That means that you can hook these units up to a Cat five or a Cat six cable, and it will give us full view of what’s going on inside the machine. So there’s a couple of different and this always is a finicky topic. Of course, connecting our machine to anybody’s network is finicky. If it’s the government, the Air Force, they want nothing to do with it. If it’s Walmart, they’ll let it happen. But they want to put some parameters in place to make sure they don’t get hacked. Other than really big companies like Walmart, Amazon, Tesla and the government, it hasn’t been an issue. So what will happen is that Cat five, Cat six cable will plug into the back of the machine and they can call us on our service number and say, Hey, my machine slowed down.

I don’t know why it’s moving slower than it was.

Something’s up. Take a look. We’ll send a signal to that machine. They’ll plug it in. We’ll send a signal to that machine that says, Do you allow Vader to access your unit? They’ll click, Yes. And then we’re logged on to their machine and we can go through all the diagnostics. So we can see the input from the motors, we can see speeds, the balance. We can check everything through there and see what’s going on with their machine. A lot of times they like I did it here in Pennsylvania when we had ours installed. I accidentally I was playing around in settings and digging around and stuff. I shouldn’t have been. I slowed the whole machine down. I called our service line, put the machine, plugged the machine in, gave them permission. In 5 minutes they set everything back to factory speeds and we were good to go. So that is a pretty nice feature.

There’s a couple of ways around that the question will come up with, especially if it’s a bigger company of they don’t want the system online, they don’t want to get hacked through the back end.

All those concerns will come up a couple of different ways around it. Most customers I’ve dealt with so far have just left them plugged in 24, seven, no big deal hours in Pennsylvania. Here it’s plugged in 24, seven. The other way around it is we can leave that Cat five cable unplugged. And when there is an issue, they can plug it in momentarily and then we can have access to it while it’s plugged in. And as soon as we’re done fixing the machine or accessing the machine to see what’s going on, we can unplug it and then they’re back offline again on the machine the other way around. It is called an MX guard. And what that does is it puts a SIM card inside of of a device called an MX guard and it allows us to connect to that VLAN without going through their network. So that’s what Walmart does.

The negative to doing that route is that they’ll have to keep an annual contract on that SIM card so we can always access it.

That’ll be their responsibility. We’ll set it up for them, we’ll give them the contract and then they’ll have to renew it yearly. I think it’s like $290 a year to renew. So not a huge cost, but there’s a little bit more cost in the machine to add that MX guard It’s 1000 I think, and then they’ll have that $290 contract annually through the provider of the SIM card. The other thing with that too, like I explain it to customers. The really nice thing about that, being able to connect that remote services. Imagine it like you’re driving a BMW and your check engine light comes on and you have to take that car to the dealer and they service it and they tell you what’s wrong and then they order the parts.

In this case, it would be like that BMW throws a check engine light and you call BMW and say, Hey, my car just threw a check engine light.

What’s going on? They can log on to your BMW, tell you exactly what’s wrong with it, what part it needs replaced. They can already have that part ordered if they don’t have it in stock. So by the time you drop that car off, it might be an hour wait. They already have the part. They know what’s wrong with it. They can plug it in and you’re back up and running instead of bringing the car in the next day, getting it serviced. 

So if something happened with the Volm and it was something was going on and it wasn’t wasn’t operating correctly, they could call us. We would log on to that machine, see exactly what’s wrong with the machine, dispatch a tech. And that tech will already show up with the part in hand. So instead of having the tech show up, finding out what’s wrong with it, ordering the part the next day comes back, puts the part in. We can we can cut out all that time, have the tech show up and have the part in the sand already. Any questions on that? That’s that’s a big selling feature for us is that remote service. It also comes with an app, so there will be a QR code. It should be shown in these literature. I’m going to get that changed.

There’s a QR code right there on the inside of the Vidir Vertical Storage Solutions machine.

You can scan that QR code with any phone, any device that supports apps. You can scan that queue. And we have our own app. It’s called the Beta App. They’ll scan that QR code and it’ll give them access to the app. The app will open up automatically, log them in. And inside of that app is manuals, user manuals. There is a number for you can connect directly to our service team. 

There is 40 different videos on how tos so little one minute links that show you and a step by step video that shows you how to add a tray, how to take a tray out, how to change a part number, how to limit certain users to accessing certain trades, how to change users password. How to get into the machine if you log yourself out and can’t remember the password. So that apps are really nice too. It gets rid of that service call of Hey, we logged ourself out and we don’t know the password or Ben quit and he was the only one that knew how to log into the machine or stuff like that. So it’s really, really simple. When we got our machine here, I went through all those videos and learned how to do just about everything in a couple of minutes.

So every machine will come with that app and every machine will have access to that app for the life of the machine.

Meaning they’re never really in the
dark. Like if it’s third shift and someone doesn’t know what they’re doing, they can watch a 45 second to a minute and 15 video on how to do that. So that’s that’s nice and it’s super helpful and using the machine. The other thing we do to before they buy the machine. So they say, yeah, we like it, we want to move forward with it. We do demo software, so we’ll plug in the software to the machine and we’ll take like it’s usually about an hour. I’ve had them go longer. If the other person’s IT teams on
the phone and they’re asking really intricate questions, but typically about an hour we’ll show them how to operate the machine. We’ll walk them through adding part numbers, deleting part numbers, and just give them a real base. Look at the inventory control software, how it operates, and it just is a little bit of a piece of mind of this isn’t so scary and it’s easy to operate and here’s how it’s done. So we do do that as well. But usually before the sale happens, before the PO is written, sometimes I’ve gotten without that and then we’ll schedule that before the machine gets installed. So we’ll have an order, we’ll set that training up, we’ll go through that training, they’ll get them the machine installed. I’ve done it with a customer in New York where they bought the machine.

We did the training before the before the POA.

We did the training after the POA and then we did the training again a week after the machine was installed. So we’ll sort of hold their hand there and get them really familiar with, with the technology as before, during and after the installation, if so needed. We also have a video, too. It’s, I think, 15, 20 minutes that shows all the steps as well that we can send as well to get them familiar with it. But I don’t expect you guys to be experts on that software there. It’s more complicated than a carousel software. Obviously, there’s a lot going on. It’s pretty simple to use, but you guys don’t have to worry about the knowledge of how is it connecting to their ERP SAP system? What API are we using any of that stuff? When you get a customer that interested and they start asking those sophisticated questions as far as technology and the software, just turn it over to us. We’ll set up a call. Obviously you’ll be on the call and I’ll set the call up with yourself, the customer, and then our I.T. guy will be on the line. A lot of times the customer will bring their IT team in on that call, too, and they can talk. And it’s pretty simple and it always works out really nicely that way. So you guys don’t don’t have to feel those questions yourself. Just bring me in the loop and I’ll get our IT guy and we’ll help you out with all those questions as far as the software and the technology of it. Dude, we’re done. Wrap it, install.

Ignore that. It takes four days to build them.

It takes everybody four days to build them. I don’t know why we put that. It’s just marketing. So I don’t I don’t know. Next that out I guess. Dual redundant DC power. That’s pretty cool. As far as I know. We’re the only ones doing this. What it is, is typically the power will run into the top right hand side of the machine. That’s the main power from the facility if they have and there is a caveat to this, but if they have a generator, that’s that their whole facility would run on for a power outage. We can wire this unit two times. So it would be a second source of power going into the unit. 

And if their whole facility is running off of a big generator on the roof or outside the building, we can wire this in to run off that as well. So you have two power hookups there. It’s not as big of a hit as I thought it would be when we were designing it, only because not as many facilities have generators that will run for 80. The machine is wired at 480, so not as many facilities have that like big, big companies John Deere, Caterpillar, big manufacturer, Space, X, Tesla, all those guys, they usually do, but medium to small companies do not. So in that case, it doesn’t really it’s not a real sell point for them unless they have that big of a generator to run everything.

 If they do, that is an option.

It’s on every machine. So whether they hook it up or not is their choice. But it comes on all of our machines. Seismic that that probably plays a little bit more for you guys than than our East Coast customers. The units are ready to they’re already seismic ready. So no matter how much weight you put in this, the only thing that would be a factor is if. Depending on what slab thickness. Like if they have four and a half inches of concrete and we have 100 trays on this machine and each one’s £1,000, we’d have to look at what the floor would support. But as far as a standard six inch slab of concrete, the units are already seismically ready to go. 

You can see in this image here, this is a pretty good one. They’re super beefed up. So we have we used to have two packages of seismic package in a non seismic package. All the units are going to go out the door. Now, with that seismic package, because it’s harder for us to produce two different options, it just streamlines everything if we just do the option right off the right off the gate. So all this extra bracing is in the cars, as in the Volm, and it’s specifically for seismic. And then if we get a look at the front of the unit, you have it all up here to even the ceiling on this machine is structural. It’s a two piece structural sealing all together around seismic. So the biggest complaint we heard was modular is they have modular design, obviously, so they can add on and take away from the Volm, which in theory seems like a great idea, but it leads to a bunch of issues and one of them being seismic, it’s really tough to get a modular unit approved seismically on the West Coast. California really, really hard. And so what modular will do is I’ll quote the system and then they’ll put a little fine print on the bottom of it pending seismic approval.

And it never does pass seismic with the standard design.

And then they come back and tell you, yeah, we can get it to pass seismic after we already took the order, but it’s 21,000. So these units, you don’t have to worry about that. They’re ready to go out the gate. There are four massive foot plates. We’ll have an image that shows them a little better, but there’s four massive foot plates on each side of this machine, so there’ll be eight foot plates total. They’re really big dispersed weight. And we don’t worry about seismic at all. I think that was it there. 

I’ll keep moving through it here.

You guys understand how the VLC works? It’s moving vertically. It’s ore moving horizontally. As you call that position. The elevator is going to move up and then it is going to pull the tray that is desired. That tray will move horizontally back on the elevator. The elevator will go down to the opening, and then it will dispense that tray into the opening. A little bit about the motors. All of this is coming on every machine, that touchscreen computer. The inventory controls are all going to come on every machine. Right now, they’re only running at 480 volt. We’re looking at getting a208 option as well, 2083 phase. We’re using a real big ten horsepower motor. So right now it has to be on 480. But stay tuned that that’s going to change in the future. We’ll have different power options for it. But right now we’re going on 480 for 60 volt retrievable speeds. It’s also in every quote. So if a customer if you get a quote to a customer and they’re asking, it’s always going to be on page two and three of the quote. Max load capacity, tray capacities, they’re all fully enclosed like we talked about earlier. z

The textured paint is is a good sticking point here.

A lot of customers are ordering these things in different colors. So it’s always an option if you want to do like John Deere gets a green and yellow unit space supplied by an all black unit. Nasser wants a red unit. So it comes like this. But if you want to change those colors, we’re more than happy to. We just need that real color. They’re powder coated, so if it’s a number for a powder, we can order that powder color and we’ll paint it. They’re color. And then every machine has a two year full warranty, just like our carousels. That includes parts and service as well. 

And with that to you get the 24/7 support on the unit.

 If you need to give us a call in the middle of the night for the foreseeable future, that’ll be for the life of BLM. So all the units sold now you’ll always be able to call us. We’re not charging any extra additional fee to to have that 24/7 support. Someday, if there’s ten, 15 to 20000 of these out there, that might change. But for now, if you sell one, it’s always going to have that 24 seven support as well. Just model numbers here. Like I said, you’ll get it. So don’t worry about writing anything down, but start at just under ten feet tall and they go up to 28 six. So the thing to keep in mind is that that’s different than modular. 

What these units is, they are one piece well to design.

So if you sell a 28 foot unit, just keep in mind that that the longest piece of that volume getting it in the door until the final resting place is going to be 28 feet long. So it presents a few challenges and like going around corners, stuff like that, always easy to get it in the door, but just keep that in mind when you’re going through the coding process, whatever height the unit is, that’s going to be the longest piece that we have to get to that to where it’s going to final resting place it’s going to be. This is a good slide to show to customers. Just gives you a breakdown on all the parts. Obviously the tray is all over here. The enclosure, there’s that two piece structural roof piece one and piece to the elevator is a good image of that slide out electrical box. Things really nice. Customers like that. 

And then your HMI and everything else is labeled in there for you.

This is a view of what that inventory control software looks like. We’ll go over it with the customer. You don’t don’t feel the need to get too familiarized with this. We’ll break down what all these screens do when they when they present a certain level of interest. We’ll set that call up. We’ll dig into it with you and the customer. Eventually, you guys will probably learn it as you do enough of them to the point where you won’t need us to be on that call anymore. But for your first couple, for sure, we’ll really hold your hand and make sure every questions answered with us on the phone as well. So you’re sort of not in the dark. Obviously a lot more complex than just the standard wire carousel. 

When you get into the nitty gritty of the software and if someone’s playing around in here and they’re into servo diagnostics or initial setup or IO status, they can they can change the unit speed, they can clear memory, they can do all sorts of different stuff in there. 

So if something like that ever happened, they would call us, plug the machine in, and we’ll set it back to factory settings for them. Options for the. Unit. They come pretty well optioned, so it’s not like there’s a ton of options. You have to present the inventory control of that touchscreen computer. That’s all the light that’s already on the unit. It’s already fully enclosed, but a few options are these fold out external arms. I think I have a picture here showing it on one of these slides. Maybe not. We’ll use this one. 

Those arms get bolted to the front of this VLAN and I have them on my one in Pennsylvania here. 

I can send you guys a picture if you want to see it in real time, but they fold in to the unit so they’re flush with the unit and then when you’re ready to use them, they just fold out. And so the the trays, the arms are kind of sit like this and what that does. And they all have little wheels on there. And what that does is it allows the tray to exit the machine and come out here. Customers. It’s really nice for adding trays, taking putting trays, more trays on the unit, taking trays off the unit. But we also sell. It’s a little cart. We call this the trade transporter, so it’ll also push those arms. 

I’ll take that tray and put it on to this cart and then you can push that cart around the facility. 

So it’s nice for like kidding circumstances like IKEA, if they’re doing Kitting, they might take a whole tray off that film with 5000 different pieces of hardware, take it to their station, use it all day for kitting, fill it back up and at the end of the night they’ll put it back into the LM. So it’s rare most customers will leave that tray in the machine for the life of the machine unless they are adding more trays. If they change their product height and they want to add more trays, they go down from like seven inches to three inch average space. 

Maybe they want to add more trays, then you would use the arms. You don’t need the arms to do it, but it just makes it a little bit nicer. But you’ll get into a circumstance where a customer will ask if the tray can come out and be taken to a workstation and then put back in. And that’s what those arms in tray are designed for. And stay tuned. We’re doing we’re doing this tray right now is manual. So you’d put the tray on this cart and you’d push this card around on these little casters. Here we have a motorized system as well that is going to drive itself. So that’s coming out here soon. Two barcode scanners, a couple hundred dollars option if they’re using barcodes. That’s a very nice setup badge reader. That’s a little bit more expensive of an option, but that works well in hospitals, government facilities, army bases, whatever Air Force base. 

That’s nice because they’re already using that system to get through doors so we can take that RFID card that they already have around their neck or on their waist and allow access to our machine and then preventative maintenance. 

We also have preventive maintenance program for them. It’s quoted on a case by case basis. So it’s going to depend where your customer is located, how many machines they have, what machine they have. But if you have a customer that wants to look into a preventative maintenance program, we are happy to get that coded for you. 

A few other options pick to light. Really nice to help them find out where their material are on the certain tray. So it’s pretty self-explanatory. But if you pull a tray down to your opening and you have this big long tray here and your product is right here, you don’t want the customer to have to walk back and forth looking for that. We have a little LED bar that will shine a light right here showing them where that is. So that’s that’s really nice in like a high flow, high pick scenario. And then what else do we have here? Customizable trays. We saw divider kits to divide that tray up. So it’s a 32 by 96 inch tray, but rarely will a customer have product that’s going to fill that whole 32 by 96 tray up as a single position. 

So we have dividers that can go with wise and depth as well, so you can get it all the way down to one inch by one inch squares with the divider kit. 

So if they need us to divide that up into different compartments for those trays, we can certainly do that. I have a few in the warehouse here in our volume that are divided up, so I could also send pictures of that as well. If a customer wants to see what that looks like finished product. But it just it just gives the compartments to the tray. The real color change we talked about. That’s nice. I feel like we don’t do a good enough job of pushing that as Vader. 

But if you’re spending $130,000 on a machine, you might as well pick what color it is. So that’s a nice option. Multiple load capacities is nice as well. What that does is basically if you have most of your product in that volume is 4 to £600 per tray, and then you have a tray or two trays or three trays that you want to do motors on, and you’re like, Oh, that’s £600, not going to be enough. We’ll send separate trays for that for £1,000. So you can have some trays that’s £600 max, some trays at £1,000 max. Sometimes customers will do them all at £1,000, cost a little bit more money. But a lot of times customers will do a mix of both. So we’ll do £601,000 trays in the same volume. And that is all I have for you guys through the literature side. Any questions about. The hook up, the. App, the software, the design. No. No. Yeah, I think. I think it all looks great. 

The differences are the longevity of the machine. 

The serviceability of the machine is really the end goal here. So all those little things like the Schneider electric components, being able to hook up to the machine, live and take a look at it. There could be a scenario where if the machine’s not working because there’s a tiny little sensor. Cut off position sensor and we showed it’s real hard to see what we show it right there. 

There’s one there and there’s one in this back corner that’s a position sensor and it lets the computer know that there’s a tray there or there’s not a tray there. So if you tell the computer, I want tray seven, what’s going to want to put whatever tray is here away first so it can go get tray seven. If that position sensor is broken, the machine thinks that it has a tray already in the position and it won’t want to move. So with being able to hook it up remotely and log on to that machine, we can go into that machine. 

We can delete the signal from that sensor, so we’ll disable it. 

For the meantime, we can dispatch a tech and have that tech show up with that sensor. So not only is the machine not broken, in the meantime, you can operate as normal with by logging on to that machine and deleting that sensor. But the next morning the tech will be there with that exact part to fix it. And you didn’t experience any downtime, whereas if we didn’t have that machine hooked up, we’d send a tech out there. He would realize that that hole, that hole, 24 hour cycle there, it wouldn’t be able to operate the machine by the time the tech got there. He would say, Oh, it’s a position sensor. I’ll call the factory, I’ll get one ordered. It would be another day till that got there. 

Even if we overnighted it, the machine is still not operating. 

Then the tech comes back in the next day and fixes it. So being able to log on to these machines remotely, figure out what’s wrong, get them up and running in that exact moment, and then also having a fix on the way for it is really, really big for service. So that’s sort of what we’re trying to sell it. As alarms have a bad name in the market, depending on who you talk to, service is it sucks on most of them. We hear horror stories all the time about VMs being down for two, three, four, five, six weeks waiting for parts. 

So we’re trying to avoid all of that and give them the best unit we possibly can and the most serviceable, long lasting unit we possibly can. So that’s that’s sort of what we try to hit home on and all the other bells and whistles, the IT side of stuff, we’ll match everything everybody else is doing, even sometimes a little easier with it being our own software, we can we can make those special changes for them.