july2017

274 275 The programs involve equipment management for large institutional customers, including federal and state government agencies, public and private universities, hospitals and healthcare systems. These organizations outsource the maintenance of a collection of equipment, and instead of buy- ing a contract from the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer), they buy protection from Remi. Schuster explains,“When the equipment breaks, they call our dispatch center, and we send the ap- propriate vendor.We manage the repair process to ensure good response time and repair comple- tion.We then pay the vendor. The client has out- sourced the headache of dealing with all that administratively, plus our program saves them 15 to 25 percent over what they were paying previously for maintenance contracts. That’s our basic value proposition.” The company tries to keep a balance among four segments–federal government, state gov- ernments, higher education, and healthcare; not wanting to be overdependent on any one sector. THE REMI GROUP It’s a portfolio play. If they have a down year be- cause something’s going on with the Fed, they can make it up in healthcare.And healthcare can be up and down too, so diversification is important. Competitors, 99 percent of the time, are OEMs –Siemens, GE, Philips,Xerox, IBM–the big guys. Howison adds,“The few like competitors we have are folks that dabble in the business. It may be an insurance company that tried to get into this a little bit and is still out there on a small scale. For another company, it might be a part-time thing. With us, it’s all we do.That’s what distinguishes us. It’s what our 125 employees do every day.We invest all our money back into the business and have been for about 20 years.There are some seri- ous entry barriers to get into this business, and if you look at what we’ve built up in a database and intellectual property and a knowledge base, it’s very hard for others to compete with us.” Maintenance contracts are a significant reve- nue generator for OEMs.Equipment servicing is done either on amaintenance contract,or on a