Click here to find out about developing commercial products based on Military IR&D programs
To paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield “Seems like us marketers get no respect!” So what do we marketers do for our money and how can we introduce your product in the most cost-effective way? It’s a lot more than just buying drinks. Specifically: How can Scentczar help you introduce your new industrial sensor, gas detector, controller, or control software in the most cost-effective way? Our work starts by identifying and understanding your potential customer, his/her needs, and how she/he does their job. What would make life easier, safer, and more productive for your intended customer? What about special needs or features required in a particular industrial process or facility? For example, OSHA requires that chemical plants ensure that electrical equipment meet Class and Division requirements. The Nuclear Industry often requires that your chemical detector be a “simple analog device”. If you’re new technological innovation doesn’t meet their requirements, as far as their concerned, you don’t have a product so why bother talking with you. Many times it’s easy to convert a sales disaster into a sales success by simply reorienting a complex or sophisticated device from a technology demonstrator to a product tailored to a particular set of customers. Some software changes, a different package, and a solid presentation – off you go! Successfully marketing technology driven products takes a marketing person with expertise in two areas: 1) understanding complex technical devices such as sensors, detectors, and data acquisition products, and 2) understanding customers and how they do their job. But first and foremost it takes people who are comfortable with people as well as technology and can communicate complex Ideas. Scentczar has those people. We can help you define a customer base and help you tailor a product to your potential customer’s needs. Just like sailing across a lake, getting your bearing in the beginning is all important. The sooner you can set an accurate course the more likely you are to achieve your goal. A bad start and you’re not going to make it. Scentczar has the experience and expertise to help you set your course. You won’t need us forever but we can sure help in the beginning.
Here is a real example from my own experience. I worked for a company that developed a new Ion Mobility Spectrometer under a government research program and wanted to sell a prototype to a large Fortune 100 company. As the marketing guy, I arrived early in the morning at the customer site to get things ready. Lots of details to attend to – I got the room set up, booklets distributed, coffee made, and, most importantly, I found out exactly who was coming and what to expect from the review team. Our principal scientist was to arrive before lunch, have time to sit with me so I could explain the review team, and then give our customer’s technical staff a critical briefing on the technology after lunch. No scientist - he was late after another meeting. Sure enough they all filed in, one Nobel Laureate and his very senior staff – all in flak jackets and hard hats. We were on the plant site and the safety rules had to be obeyed even for briefings. I was thrilled – I swallowed my desire to ask for an autograph. Our principal scientist showed up late and whipped out a 6 inch stack of viewgraphs. He surveyed the crowd and sized them up as being low level technicians. He looked at me with scorn and said: “Joe who are these people?”. The Nobel Laureate, clearly in charge, looked at him straight in the eye and said:”show us the last viewgraph first and if we’re interested we’ll look at the rest”. This clearly caught our guy off guard and he seemed to reel like a boxer who’d taken a terrible blow. To make a long story short, he did recover and we did make a sale. But scientists don’t often make good marketers. They pay very close attention to details, but frequently the wrong details for a guy who has to make the sale. As my old boss used to tell me:”nothing happens until someone sells something to somebody”. Peer reviewed articles are great but you need someone to help you create a practical product for a well defined set of customers.
Over a number of years there have been great innovations that have been very successfully developed around someone’s insight into a specific customer’s problem – the market pulled the technology along, and if the market is big enough that’s just fine. For example various sampling probes for methane in sewers, fence line monitors using open path infrared, etc. Little wheeled carts and sampling probes on broomsticks are not high technology but they make a customer with a bad back feel a whole lot better when he has to work overtime to find a leak. The most challenging problem however, is taking a brand new technology, for example developed under an SBIR contract with the military or NASA, and finding commercial applications. In other words Technology Push. This usually requires great communications skills, and the ability to approach customers who are very busy doing something else in order to get them to pay attention to your new idea. Getting a customer to think outside of the box and consider your product is a beautiful thing. Once they like your idea they have to sell it to their own management. Everybody’s baby is beautiful to its parents but might not be so beautiful to someone with a Laser-like focus on staying in budget and on time. You’re asking your potential customer to take a risk and most people, especially people who design and operate industrial plants, are risk averse. So here’s the challenge: finding a way to explain a complex new technology to a set of not-so-interested customers in such a way that they become advocates or “technology champions” for your new technology to their own management as well to their community of competitors, suppliers, and customers. Success usually starts with a very diplomatic cold call and a well written explanation on your web site.
Early in my career I worked for a large defense contractor who developed chemical warfare detectors for the military. They were very successful at this and had successfully sold several generations of detectors in large production runs. The government procurement documents they had to follow went to great lengths to encourage functional design and form follows function, but, after watching the most experienced designers, I realized that they had a particular style in mind. They knew how the customer thought the product should look and feel and it went way beyond simply meeting the weight or size requirements. Certain features such as how the flow meter screwed into the case were all important and showed “clever design” in the customer’s eyes. The more I looked at the product and watched the experienced designers design it the more I realized how important it was to get the style just right. It had to look military if you expected the customer to stand up and salute. Later I transitioned over to help develop a commercial product based on a spin-off from the military product line. Guess what the same is true with industrial products but of course the style is completely different. A very important part of a marketing person’s job is to separate the wheat from the chaff and participate in design reviews and early product development meetings in order to ensure that at the end of the day customers will stand up and salute. It’s a little bit subtle when compared to consumer products but the idea is the same. Not only does the customer know what the product is supposed to do, he or she knows what the product is supposed to look and feel like - making a sale depends on it.
You can train an engineer to embrace the latest in technology in school or very soon after. There you are with the latest and greatest technology. By the time you have a product mature enough for a salesman the keys to success are probably motivation, perseverance, and simply doing what it takes to meet a goal. Marketing is a little more subtle. The ability to market is the ability to work with people and communicate ideas in both directions. Marketing requires diplomacy, tact, and attention to life style details as well as technical details. Understanding human nature and what will make customers suddenly change their behavior and suddenly pick up a new tool or try a new system takes real insight and experience. Since you’ve gotten this far I’ll reward you with my favorite video clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus . Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Regards
Scentczar is helping RMC market their Sensor Companion™
Scentczar has focused on chemical detectors over most of our history. Many chemical detectors require a transducer or chemical sensor to convert chemical signal to electrical signal, as illustrated in figure 1, but there are interesting exceptions. Scentczar’s Miniature Passive Indicator, for example, uses a dot of dye on a substrate which migrates over calibration marks in response to hydrocarbon vapors – no batteries required. The sensor would be the dye spot and the detector would be the entire device including dye spot, calibration marks, and substrate. Figure 1 is sort of a canonical model for the chemical detector. In the model of figure 1 the detection system has to sample the environment or a process stream. Some systems are required to sample ambient air, an open path through ambient air, or a surface located in ambient air. Other systems require an inlet to match the ambient air, gas, or liquid stream to the detector system. For example, Scentczar worked on a fuel cell management system that required us to detect parts per million levels of carbon monoxide in a wet hydrogen stream, with no ambient air, coming from a catalytic converter. If the level of carbon monoxide went above a threshold the system would shut down the converter. Other process problems might involve detecting trace contaminants in a hydrocarbon stream or ammonia in an exhaust stack for example.
Figure 2 is a pictorial diagram of a modern chemical detector. With the magic of microprocessors there are not many components that go into a system. The system of figure 2 has a sampling head, an air moving system, chemical sensing cell which can be chosen from a range of technologie, and the rest is electronics. The power supply often consists of a switching power supply that powers the rest of the system. The largest power draw is frequently from heaters that may be required to keep the system at a constant temperature above ambient. Lightening protection is provided because the system may be installed in a remote box somewhere on a plant site.
Most chemical detectors start with a particular application and then are modified to serve other applications as the system gains acceptance in the market place and other customers with similar problems are identified. Frequently the original market is limited and will become saturated if the developer does not continually prospect for related markets. Thus the two most secure people in the organization are the marketing guru and the applications engineer. Figure 3 is an illustration of how this process works.
Figure 3 illustrates the normal course of events in a typical chemical detector business. The marketing guru spends his/her days out there visiting customers and attending trade events finding the latest problems to be solved. Once a likely candidate is identified the Applications Engineer mocks up the problem in the laboratory. If the mock up looks promising a prototype of the process is developed and tested. In the modern era of software the prototypes for a variety of customers can be quite similar. One of the advantages of dealing with the process industries is that plants tend to follow standard designs. For example there are two standard designs for oil refinery alkylation plants utilizing hydrogen fluoride. Once you’ve demonstrated your product with a standard design the next marketing chore is to identify all of the plants with that design for implementation. If you’ve left your first customer with a good feeling you’ve got an in with all the plants of similar design.
Much of the drive to develop chemical detectors since the 1950’s has come from three sources: 1) military requirements for chemical warfare detectors, 2) the oil refiners desire to switch from human sampling and laboratory analysis to real time analysis for the refining of fuel products, and 3) government regulation including EPA, OSHA, and mine safety requirements. A number of detector systems were developed by the military, in very expensive development programs, to detect chemical warfare agents and were later adapted to solve industrial problems. The petrochemical industry started with process gas chromatographs, which are considered process analyzers along with physical measurement systems, and are used to measure the distillation products of hydrocarbons. Much of the original process gas chromatograph work was done at Greenbrier Instruments in Lewisburg WVA. The plant has changed hands many times. A number of stand-alone chemical detectors have their start has gas chromatograph detectors.
All of the disciplines listed in figure 3 are needed in order to convert a chemical sensor into a useful chemical detector. Chemical Engineering is probably the least needed discipline because a customer usually has to develop a detailed specification including temperatures, pressures, flow rates, etc. A chemical detector is a complete system and requires an interdisciplinary approach.
Application |
Detection Requirement |
Health & Safety |
Health and Safety instruments are relatively sensitive detectors designed to respond to chemical vapors in the sensitivity range specified by OSHA regulations. Many health and safety detectors are portable and some are miniature. A typical portable application would be checking out a storage tank for residue before entering it. There are also fixed site area detectors and fence line monitors. A typical area monitor would be a hydrogen fluoride (HF) detector network inside and around an alkylation plant in an oil refinery. |
Field Analytical Instruments |
This relatively new chemical instrument is used to screen samples in the field, for example an EPA superfund site, for survey purposes or even to plan remediation activities such as removing dirt. These instruments save money by focusing the clean up activity to where it is needed and by greatly reducing the number of samples required to be shipped back to a laboratory. A good example of a Field Analytical Technique using a chemical detector is an instrumented Cone Penetrometer (CP). CPs are instrumented rods pushed into the soil at a site undergoing a survey or remediation to detect the presence of contaminants in the soil and ground water. Testing is made quite easy with the elimination of the requirement to excavate an entire site. |
Chemical Warfare Agent (CWA) detectors |
CWA detectors can be considered a special case of Health & Safety detectors and there has been much cross pollination between the military and civilian worlds especially after 9/11. For example portable Ion Mobility Spectrometers (IMS) were turned from laboratory curiosities into CWA detectors through large military programs and eventually found their way into industrial applications. Conversely the advent of homeland security required that military detectors be useful in detecting industrial chemicals such as chlorine and ammonia. These Toxic Industrial Chemicals (TICs) were not a military concern prior to 9/11. |
Explosives Detectors |
This is a relatively recent chemical detector application but has resulted in the installation of many high end detectors. The application pushes the limits of detector sensitivity. Events such as airliner bombings have provided a great deal of funding. |
Explosive Vapor Detectors |
Unlike explosives detectors explosive vapor detectors are one of the original chemical detector applications and go back to early coal mines and sewer maintenance where methane is a problem. Explosive vapors or gases are only explosive in a range of concentrations in air. Explosive vapor detectors are designed to alert the operator when the vapor or gas is in the dangerous range. Many potentially explosive vapors are not particularly toxic so this is a different application. Early detectors drew a sample into a small sealed chamber and ignited it measuring the temperature change to indicate an explosive environment. |
Process Analyzer |
Process Analyzers are automated instruments used in a chemical processing plant to adjust the parameters of the process based on real time measurements of the product or intermediates. These analyzers have an advantage in that they add value to the product and can therefore justify a significant investment to purchase, install, and maintain them. Process analyzers also greatly reduce the need for onsite chemical laboratories by automating measurements that used to require laboratory analysis. Many devices considered process analyzers are not chemical detectors per se but estimate boiling points, etc. One of the original process analyzers was the process gas chromatograph used in oil refineries. |
Stack or Continuous Emission Monitor (CEM) |
Continuous Emission Monitors are required by USEPA and foreign equivalents to accurately measure the target gases being emitted into the environment. They are required to be very accurate but there are only a few required in a plant and they can be quite sophisticated. CEMS can be further broken down into extractive systems which draw a sample from the stack and in-situ instruments which directly measure the effluent in the stack. |
Emergency Response |
This is a relative new category of instrument which is used to trigger a plant shut down or remediation system. Frequently electrochemical cells commonly used in Health & Safety applications are adapted for this application but they are a very poor fit because they are subject to false alarms which either may cause an inadvertent plant shut down or worse a catastrophe because operators turn them off or ignore them. |
Here are some of the considerations that go into evaluating a chemical detector for a particular application.
Parameter |
Discussion |
Performance |
Performance includes: sensitivity, linear range, speed of response, and false alarm rate including the ability to reject other gases in the matrix. Some applications do not require an accurate concentration estimate, for example, chemical warfare agent detection and filter breakthrough but must operate with a complex uncontrolled matrix of coexisting materials. Some process and Continuous Emissions Monitoring (CEM) applications operate with a very small and well known list of coexisting gases but require superb quantitative accuracy. |
Environment |
Environment includes: temperature range, humidity including condensing water, shock and vibration, the ability to withstand a drop if a portable instrument. |
Reliability |
Reliability is a big issue for most chemical detector systems in the field. An understanding of a new application requires an understanding of the cost of a false alarm and the cost of a misdetection as well as a good understanding of the environment. For example electrochemical cells are very commonly used inexpensive detectors but care must be taken to ensure that coexisting gases will not cause a false alarm and that the detectors are installed in an enclosure that protects them from drastic temperature changes. False alarms can trigger expensive and disruptive actions or worse encourage workers to ignore the alarm. |
Installation and Maintenance |
It is best when evaluating a new application for a detector to consider the facilities available at the site including available power, the availability of various gases such as instrument air or water, mounting requirements. It is sometimes surprising what is available. Another big issue is calibration. Calibration can be difficult and expensive. |
Cost |
Life cycle cost rather than initial cost is terribly important when evaluating a detector for a given application. Process Control and filter breakthrough applications are most easily justified because they clearly save the customer money. Initial cost is more important for other applications. Life cycle cost includes the initial cost of the detector, the cost to install it, the cost to maintain it and the cost to dispose of it. |
Here’s a specific example: Finding new markets for the Shur-Shot
Chemical Detector. If you are aware of the history of chemical
detectors, Shur-Shot represents an unusual detector used in an unusual application.
Scentczar has a task to investigate new markets for the Shur-Shot chemical detector now manufactured by ATB Analytics LLC. Shur-Shot is currently targeted for the detection of hydrogen fluoride (HF) at crash concentrations in oil refinery alkylation plants. Alkylation plants are used in oil refineries to increase the octane of gasoline. The Shur-Shot is used to trigger complex remediation equipment in the event of an HF leak . A Video of the accidental release of HF from an oil refinery alkylation plant is available from the Chemical Safety Board. Shur-Shot’s ability to detect HF at a moderate concentration with very short response time, and extremely high confidence (ultra low false alarm rate), is key to its success in this application. Remediation systems, although critical to community safety, can easily cause significant plant damage in the event of a false alarm.
Shur-Shot was originally developed by Exxon Mobil for alkylation plants in oil refineries and was originally manufactured by Environmental Technologies Group (ETG) in Baltimore Maryland.
After going through a number of manufacturers, ATB LLC picked up the Shur-Shot and currently sells the Shur-Shot world wide. Although there are a number of oil refinery alkylation plants worldwide, HF detection in oil refinery alkylation plants is a limited market. Scentczar’s task is to find new markets for the Shur-Shot both in other HF applications and in other chemical applications requiring a chemical “fuse” to initiate an emergency procedure in the event of an accidental chemical release.
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Specific Function |
Potential Application |
Chemical Processing Plants |
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Transportation |
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Fire Suppressant Systems |
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Explosive Gas Hazard |
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