| Thanks for taking the time to answer, sorry for coming across bluntly, but it is a pretty big sell. I appreciate you taking the time to address those points and yours and the above commenter did clarify things. In industries relying on large machines, there's always companies promising their tools or their parts or their systems will increase profits and efficiency etc. In many cases i've seen, the benefits end up being marginal, while complexity in the current systems are increased. They end up bringing their own maintenance challenges and other unexpected challenges. Availability of proprietary attachments and parts was always a big issue. We'd be at the whims of the sole provider as far as availability, pricing and delivery time went. This factors in to the amount of downtime when inevitable down time occurs. There's a big difference between waiting a week for your fancy proprietary doodad to show up than sending someone to the hardware store. Every external proprietary system you add to your current system is another layer of 'things' that comes with it's own problems eventually. My questions aren't so much about how much money this will save from down times, but how much extra money will it cost when inevitable problems do occur with it. Is it going to cost more in the long run than current human error does? What i've noticed a lot of these systems actually do isn't reduce losses or increase profits, it just hides the losses further down the road. From what I can tell, this system would be applied to hundreds of individual grease zerks across an entire industry, requiring likely at least a dozen or more of your proprietary ends. Now, we're reliant not only on every one of those zerks functioning properly always, but we're limited in the amount of greasegun's we can actually deploy. As the other commenter said, the greasegun attachments are expensive. They're going to be used a lot, everything that's used a lot wears down. Hell, normal greaseguns die pretty regularly. This is now a new expensive part that the company will have to rely on to perform basic maintenance, which itself will need either maintainance or replacement at some point. At which point, the company's waiting for their delivery instead of just going to buy a new greasegun. On gun down means a loss of a person's worth of greasing until it's replaced. That's time and money lost there on top of the cost of replacement. A zerk down means no data from that one until it's replaced meaning it's back to human error again. I appreciate your zerks and attachments may be built ruggedly, but everything in a machine is prone to wear and breakage and eventually, they will bring maintenance issues. What are the extra costs this will bring on top of initial and other ongoing service costs? Are they low enough to actually save money in the long run? 5-10 years down the road? These aren't tech startups with ephemeral existences, these machines will need to be relied on for years are you offering that kind of reliability? A decade from now, will I still be able to buy your proprietary attachments and your zerks? |