On behalf of Industrial Technologies, I’d like to welcome you to the first-ever Ingersoll Rand Product Blog!
My name is David Welch and I lead Global Marketing and Innovation for the Industrial Technologies sector. That sounds like a mouthful, but in reality, my job revolves around ways to make our products more safe, reliable, and efficient, and to make sure that we are easy to do business with. We would not be able to do this without understanding your needs and values, and that is why our Industrial Technologies colleagues and customers are extremely important to the foundation of our mission.
We hope you will use this blog as your mouthpiece to share your insights about how we can innovate our products, services, and solutions! Please share with us your unique ideas and tell us a bit more about your customer experiences while you’re at it- we always love to hear about what is being said about our products, company, and brand.
But first, we want to let YOU decide whether this blog will be valuable towards improving communication with our Industrial Technologies colleagues. Will you, as a reader, find this blog interesting, and will you, as a blogger, be willing to respond to our conversations about what our next big innovation should be?
Help us make the decision! Don’t be shy; your opinion matters and you can help make the difference! Speak up; we’re listening!
I will find this blog extremely engaging & useful if we can succeed in closing the loop. Depending on the volume of comments received, it may not be possible to communicate back on all comments and suggestions. However, if we can notify participants by e-mail when their suggestion has been reviewed and the outcome of that analysis, that will greatly enhance the sense of being valued and being involved.
Hi Arland thanks for your note. We are going to do our best to quickly respond to all discussions. In the case of a suggestion we may not have the ability to instantly answer back. The suggestion, idea or concept will more than likely require investigation, customer response measurement, etc. Our process will be to keep a log of the ideas and stream them into our Innovation process. Like our Open Innovation Portal all ideas (over 1,000 to date) will be appreciated and reviewed, we don’t plan to answer back on all ideas. We hope all understand and contribute! I promise we will value and consdider all ideas, start contributing.
Dave,
Yes, I appreciate your team’s work to open up the table to ideas from all employees and I know that generates a lot of concepts to consider. I suppose what I was trying to get at was not the actual consideration of all submissions–which I know your team will work on–but how that is communicated back so that submitters know it is in process. If you click a button on your computer and nothing happens, you click it again.
So, with appreciation for the enormity of the task of sorting through all the innovation in ITS, perhaps a step to further enhance the process would be a “ticket” system where it is possible for users to check the “status” of their ideas and see who has reviewed them, if they have been passed along, or what concerns prompted them to be set aside for the present.
Again I support your project and will be glad to see it catch on across the company.
After reading over some of the web log responses above, I wonder if a bulletin board type interface might be easier to navigate than a weblog environment. I was surprised how quickly I was able to navigate away from this blog site to sites providing information on your competitors brands. I was considering how I might like wander in here on a weekly basis and spend a few moments looking to see what might be of interest to me to read or comment on, and to be honest reading through just these few entries was a bit more time consuming than it should have been.
Hi Mike – we considered a bulletin board but decided to try out a blog. The bulletin board leaves a footprint and reference table that we weren’t interested in for our purposes. We will be teeing up subjects regularly, tring to create interest, generate conversation, get feedback on concepts and then move on to a fresh topic…hopefully you will not find the process to time consuming.
And yes the WWW quickly facillitates the gathering of information about everybody. We are planning on being more interesting and offer a venue where we listen. We’re not trying to sell, we’re trying to learn about your customers’ pain point or needs and than work tyhe community to solve for them.
Thanks for dropping by, give us a chance and ncome on back.
Hi Arlan – well thanks for the dialog and suggestions. I agree people want to know what happens with their suggestions and insights. We will consider your suggestions and see if we can develop a feedback system. Thanks!
Alan – what will REALLY be interestsing will be the time when the blog starts answering the blog and closing the loop… Let me give you an example:
Recently I was at the Lazy 5 Ranch with my family taking photographs from the back of a wagon ride. I pressed the wrong button on my camera and the result was that I could not view the screen because it was covered up with a graph. Swallowing my male pride, I asked the guy nest to me for help. He couldn’t fix it in 30 seconds so he pulled out his iPhone and Googled the issue. He was directed to a non-Nikon website/blog where someone else had left a post with the same problem. He used this to fix the problem – took about 2 mins. So I got to take a picture of the Giraffe from the back of a wagon and was not angry with Nikon for ruining my trip…
Wonder if this could happen with one of our products? Just interesting thoughts – I don’t know the answers, but I’d like to be closer than I am now. Let me know what you think.
Hi Hank,
I know personally a vehicle service technician. I had the opportunity to discuss with him how a concept I had for a tool innovation might work in the field. It will certainly help our outcome-driven innovation if we can bring those conversations into a web forum where all our teams can review the customer input.
There is certainly a lot of potential to build relationships with customers over the web.
Arlan
I agree completely that we could utilize this blog to share information, application tips, “how to” tutorials for our products.
But more importantly, it will show us where we could improve our products/services through the issues which will keep surfacing as more bloggers share their experiences with our offerings.
Definitely agree with you though that this blog could help solve some common issues for our customers!
Great initiative and in right direction! It should lead to increased and effective collaboration within vast talent available in the sector and the company. For people like me who always wanted to blog, but never found a good solid reason to do so, this can be a stimulus. I look forward to enthusiastic interaction with the Ingersoll Rand ITS community. Just one question: Is it limited only to people within ITS? The name ITS product blog, gave me that impression. If we want to bring in new ideas, fresh perspectives then the blog should also encourage cross sector participation. Another suggestion is that this blog should be more than a mere discussion. It needs to be different. It needs to be engaging like social networking sites enabling tagging of people, ideas, and products that will lead to evolved thinking. I see that there’s a ‘notify by email’ option just below this text box. So that’s good. I look forward to interacting with you all.
Good Day Bhushan, nice to hear from you. Our blog is open to everyone in Ingersoll Rand and the rest of the blogging world. To start up our blod we decided to focus on our own community. It is our hope over time the quality of our blog will spark interest with our customers, suppliers, universities, etc. Please spread the word to your community. Regarding your enabling suggestion, this is stage one. We are presently working on our Social Media strategy and I believe over the course of 2010 we will become more engaged. Go Innovate!
Few comments:
1) Extending one blog “ouside of ITS” is a very bad idea. We can have an IR site which could host a lot of different blogs.
2) I am not sure how this blog gets promoted (linked) from the other webpages. We do obviously would like to hear the voice of the customer – not only of the other Ingersoll Rand people.
Alternatively we can have this blog limited to IR team only – that would allow more open comments.
3) Yes, to me blog might be much better tool than any survey we may run. Subjects shall be “provocative” to provoke people comments.
4) So let’s be provocative: IR has recently replaced “not sol old” ratchets (series 1133/1103 and 1200/1210) by new series 1105MAX and 1207MAX. I’ve heard quite a few comments that is those were not the products which were required to be replaced. Any opinion on this issue?
Hi Darek – thanks for your comments. Sorry you think a public blog is a bad idea, I respectfully disagree. I think Ingersoll Rand will greatly benefit from external views and opinions. As one who works in an office with little customer interface I think this is a great opportunity to hear what customers think and want first hand. As a matter of fact we want to know what suppliers, universities and other think too!
On to point two – blogs get promoted or linked by being interesting, informative or in other words of value. We have begun that process by giving you links to other associated blogs under our Blogroll section.
Dave,
I am not sure I have expressed myself very well.
By “not having the blog extended outside of ITS” I mean that it could be of an advantage to have “one blog” focused on specific subject. If in one blog we will have “tool” / “compressor” / “locks” / “air balancer”, it may end up with a mess.
I would never come with a suggestion to to limit amount of the people allow to express themselves on a specific subject. I would always appreciate to collect as much different opinion from as much different places / people as possible.
Hi Darek – thanks for the feedback.
The 1103/1133 and 1200/1210 ratchets were both nearing the end of their product life cycles and warranted a refresh in order to allow Ingersoll Rand to continue to offer industry leading products in those categories. The 1105MAX ratchet offers a number of upgrades from the 1103, including improved torque & speed, a hand-operable variable speed regulator, and a number of other improvements. Check out the 1105MAX home page for a complete overview. The 1207MAX ratchet also offers a number of upgrades from the 1200 including improved torque, a hand-operable variable speed regulator, a patent-pending forward reverse collar, and a number of other improvements. The 1207MAX homepage will be available on January 25, 2009 for a complete overview.
Stay tuned for more tool launches in 2010!
Bill,
Thank you for your comments.
I have been trying to be “provocative”.
It is obvious that without having new products company like Ingersoll Rand will not survive. Yet we are faced with the customers opinion we I have tried to “re-quote”. And such customers tend to say that we have more important gaps, and may be we should give more focus to angle grinder with 5″ guard.
Darek,
Thanks for your comments. You mention a need for an angle grinder with a 5″ guard – we do have a couple of options: a G Series in our premium range – the G3A120RP105. We also have the brand new 345MAX in our Automotive/MRO range – check it out at the link below:
http://www.ingersollrandproducts.com/IS/Product.aspx-am_en-35497
Let us know if one these would fill the gap – thanks!
Bill
Bill,
Thank you for the hint. G2 / G3 series pretty very well. What I meant was exactly what 345MAX might be. I was not aware it is already there: catalogues to be printed in Europe will most probably not include this tool. And its predececor (3445) was not available in 5″ version.
Best regards, Darek
Hi Darek, Dave again…
We appreciate your comments and point of view and trust you are good with our dialog, I am! Keep on blogging and by the way do you have any Innovation ideas???
Dave,
I haven’t been on the blog for some time.
With some years in IR “Tool” business I have “forged” my opinion on quite a few “TFM” issues. What about:
http://www.ingersollrandproducts.com:
=======================
- Some years ago when internet started – all tend to pay (sic!) for having web page address “as-short-as-possible”. Some customers are asking now why new IR web page address is so long?
- One of IR focuses is to expands “outside US”. Unquestionable is substantial improvement of current web page with what we had before (especially for any English speaking person).
But those whose English vocabulary is “<200 words", claim web page structure became more difficult to understand & search for information.
Positive is we stepped back from "Ingersoll Rand slang" like "Bolting Solution" or "Surface Preparation" which for non-English speaking people were some sort of mysterious expressions. But common expressions like Material Handling (instead of pulling and lifting) or Fluid Handling (for pumping) still remain puzzle for them.
I think there was the intention to have those web pages translated to other languages. One-off cost to have those 50.000 pages (?) translated must be high, but the effort required to maintain them might be even higher.
So: shouldn't we think about something more simple for "non-English speakers"?
Please note they cannot take part in the blog, as their English skill does not allow for this…
Best regards
Darek
Looks like just a Tool blog to me……also you might want to fix the spelling of January about the monthly question. : )
Hi Bev – thanks for catching our typo. Yes, Max is a terrific Ingersoll Rand product brand and makes for a great blog slogan. Come back and watch us grow into conversations on all of Industrial Technologies Air, Fluid, Mater Handling and Tool products.
Hello Dave – I think the blog is a great idea. I’m very excited to see where this goes, and how it affects IR’s overall strategy within social media.
Best regards,
Hank Demarest
I think the IR blog is a great idea. A simple RSS feed will keep fans and industry people up to date on the latest from IR. It’s also a great forum to ask questions / make comments and get real feedback from both IR folks and other users. It should work very well in conjunction with the new YouTube channel. Can’t wait to see some more new products.
Thanks to everyone for their support! All of us on the global marketing and innovation team truly believe that this blog will generate some great innovation insights! We look forward to engaging with everyone out in the blogosphere as we become active members in social media.
“Torque Reaction” As a new distributor salesman I an my DSM, Jack Riesche learned the hard way about torque reaction.
It was 30 years ago and Jack and I were new to outside selling. We went to Winchester foundry in North/East Indiana to solve the problem of gettinig the man hole frame for Gas Lines, 10″ dia., out of the sand mold. They needed a lot of torque and could not use an impact tool which would damage the mold. AH HAY!! A 551 series T Handled Drill ought to twist that dude out. So we carried it in, took both of us to do it, hooked it up to a two inch air hose and we were ready. The customer ask how we were going to, “handle the reaction”, Jack said, “you just hold on to it” and the customer replied, “OK go ahead and show us”. Jack set it on the part told me he didin’t need my help, and turn it on. First and last time I saw Jack fly. That beast just picked him up and turned him around the part. That was our introduction to, “Torque Reaction”.
It sounds like you learned pretty quickly about torque reaction Paul! That is an interesting application, perfect for the reactionless torque that you would get from an Impactool except for the sensitivity of the molds. I will make a note of the application to see if we have any other products that might solve the problem. Thanks for your story, and please check back often for updates to our blog!
Hi Dave,
I think the blog is a great idea. With our focus on innovation, a forum for sharing and potentially sparking even more ideas from the ideas and experiences of others is essential. In the five minutes I’ve been on this site, I’ve learned a bit more about some of our products and I now know what a ‘foot pound’ is! Information is food for thought, which in turn will lead to innovation.
Wow Kathie you made my day!!! Come back often and share your ideas. As we evolve in this process we will be posting some need statements for all to ideate on. Stay tuned. Thanks for blogging!
HI David,
Great idea in this. Would you want to have someone to drive this in Asia? For example, you can reach out to someone in China, Singapore etc and this can be reached out a bigger audience on site. Sometimes, these things are seen to be ”US Centric”
Just a thought.
…jeffrey
Hi Jeffrey!
Thanks for your comments. We’d love to see our blog expand to all regions of the world- currently our blog links to all our products website for all regions but is not is not offered in multiple languages.
You can help us make it happen though! Please keep engaging and spreading the world!
Hi Jeffrey – Sometimes you have to walk before you run. We like you would love to see Ingersoll Rand social media activity all over the world; I believe we will someday soon. As a matter of interest ITS leadership has a team of really bright people studies that opportunity right now. Help us help you by letting your leadership know we should be active in social media!
I’m so excited to see another Ingersoll Rand blog! I have one for Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies and it has been a great way to connect with our customers. Good luck!
- Lori
P.S. I’m glad to see that you have a team working on this because it’s tough to manage alone. I think I need to find myself a team!
Hello Dave,
Having a blog for ITS is a fantastic idea. A great way for all of us to share our ideas. As I read through the comments here I learnt soo much more about our own products some of which I didn’t know.
Many of us have tendency to be “frogs in our own well”. This will be an excellent platform to look at other’ ideas and persective on various subjects. This will for sure change the way we approach the things. The blog will definitely act as a great tool for me to pick up lot of ideas to be used in my work area.
Thanks a ton to you and your team for starting this.
Amar S
Where it is difficult to bobtain information and data from the main site a blog could be useful.
Where do you publsh for microturbines heat recovery and efficiency charhts and calculations?
Charles,
I have attached a link that will allow you to download the specification sheet for the microturbine. The website also has a contact us section if you have additional questions.
http://www.ingersollrandproducts.com/IS/Product.aspx-am_en-34697
I feel good to read your blog on the Industrial suppliments
The Rajendra industrial is one of the huge suppliers of Etching stainless steel sheets
I feel good to read your blog on the Industrial suppliments
The Rajendra industrial is one of the huge suppliers of Etching stainless steel sheets