Business View - May 2015 109
supplier relationships take place across the six above-
mentioned states, Fearn said it has grown with some
of its large accounts that have a national footprint. ABT
has customer sites in 26 states, as a result of its’ cus-
tomers implementing best practices.
The bulk of customers on the material handling side
of the business are companies with manufacturing
and distribution interests on a nationwide scale; while
the reserve side of the operation frequently includes
provision and installation of switch gear backup power
equipment for new construction and related building
sites.
“We realized the gap in the marketplace was that a
lot of people sold and serviced product, but maybe a
lot of people didn’t have the expertise, knowledge or
inclination to manage the systems that were sold,” he
said. “So we began installing monitoring equipment on
the assets, that would upload data into our server and
we’d get to view – almost in real time – the operational
performance and attributes of the equipment.”
“From that emerged a program that we trademarked
‘GuaranteedPOWER®,’ and we set ourselves apart
by basically selling DC power into the forklift industry,
selling battery power as a service which packages the
equipment and the service into a fixed monthly cost.
This approach made it easy for our customers to bud-
get and took the risk off our customers for improper
sizing and poor maintenance.”
The investment in monitoring, Fearn said, provided a
chance for ABT to separate from the crowd.
“The opportunity came because we started studying
fleets, and we developed the fleet assessment process
as the backbone of our business,” he said. “We start-
ed identifying the inefficiency in the marketplace and
SUPPLY CHAIN / LOGISTICS
