Providing an on-point, creative solution that increases a client’s return on technology investment and produces the Raving Results we constantly seek to deliver.

The Client: Allied Electronics

The Account Representative: Lisa Baird (Coppell Office)

Resiliency. That’s the word that defines Lisa Baird’s recent “Solutions Success” with Allied Electronics.  The story with this Fort-Worth based company begins with defeat for Lisa, after she lost the bid in 2014. But she refused to give up.

Looking back, Datamax won this major account not on price or exclusively on the solutions themselves, but rather by Lisa’s persistent efforts in maintaining a relationship with specific people at Allied over the course of several years.

Patience, as it turns out, is a real virtue.

The Business Challenge

“I still remember exactly where I was (in 2014) the day that I got the letter saying Allied was going with another vendor.  It was definitely very tough.

After we lost the bid, Allied was facing several challenges with its fleet (which included 125 machines total) with the provider at the time. Their packing station printers needed more speed. With 45 remote locations around the US, they were having a lot of issues with downtime and getting resolution from their servicing dealer.  These small remote locations might have just one MPF, but it was down, it would stay that way for days.

This posed a huge issue. Generally, I think they were over-promised things with their previous vendor.”

The Thought Process

“We went through a painstaking process in making sure we could validate everything we were proposing we could do.

To back up a few years prior though…. After we lost the bid in 2014, we had a follow up meeting and came away with several positives. They appreciated our attention to detail and our thorough discovery process. We were asking questions that others weren’t asking. We took that feedback, and over the next few years, I just developed a relationship with these individuals. Rachel Rhodes and I would go to lunch with them, and a lot of times we wouldn’t even talk business. Anytime we had a show or open house, I would invite them to attend. I would routinely send them articles I thought would be pertinent.

When it came time again to go to bid, we had many, many internal meetings with (Director of Operations) Keith Lenore, (Director of Service) Steve Kennemer, Rachel Rhodes and Clay Mills.  While we weren’t unfamiliar with ITT orders, the fact that we had to manage all these locations (45 remote locations) under a single source, I did not want to speak out of turn on what we could commit to service-wise.

When it came to servicing all these remote locations, we reached out to our dealer network; also, with us managing it all here (in Coppell), we could find out before something was a big issue, and interject a problem before it became day three or four."

The Prevailing Results

"We are fully ingrained, fully installed. We’ve gotten great feedback on the implementation and our communication with Allied regarding installation.

However, we’ll continue to ask for feedback.

We actually just came from our implementation close out meeting with them. They said they feel like we are a true partner and we set up a partnership review schedule. The Director of IT said normally his department would dread the “copier” refresh project, but Datamax made it a seamless process. They also said that they feel like we are a true partner and are excited for the relationship."