Getting Started with AEi
We need to know some basic information about your specific needs and objectives to begin working with you. This is the first step for us to mutually define the best soluton to meet your requirements.
You can start the process of putting AEi to work with by emailing, calling into our staff, or by submitting a form from our contact us page.
We understand that your projects are complex and we are committed to delivering on our promises to you and making working together a smooth process.
We have developed a pre-sales information exchange process and comprehensive post-sales order project management process suitable for automation systems. These are helpful to optimize how we define and develop solutions to best meet your needs and to mutually address resource planning, scheduling, control, communication and reduction of risk.
Initial Steps
When we start a dialog with a new potential customer, we begin typically with some sort of mutual non-disclosure agreement (NDA). The purpose of the agreement is to protect both your intellectual property and other proprietary information as well as ours. Most if not just about all of our customers want to work with us to help them in the process of bringing some new product or technical innovation to fruition. This sometimes begins at the early stage of R&D but also applies on through to full production ramp up. Protecting your ideas is essential to make this maximally successful and we understand that. We will also be sharing AEi technical innovations with you as we work together so we need protection as well. AEi has standard NDA templates for this purpose but we can also work with customer provided agreements as needed. NDAs are not always needed but we find them often appropriate.
Getting a basic needs or requirements list to us is the next logical step. This does not have to be a detailed formal request for quotation but just a simple basic set of functional requirements can help us start to define a proposed outline of scope of work and rough budgetary estimates of costs, phase by phase. We will also use you initial requirements definition to decide what existing AEi products/platforms and process expertise and background can be best applied to meet your needs to minimize costs, deployment time, and risk.
We provide you a top level summary of our initial proposed scope of work to meet your needs along with estimated costs and time frames plus associated assumptions. This helps us collectively define early on if we are a good match to your needs. This also provides a springboard for us to start fleshing out assumptions and technical requirements to the next level. We also typically provide supporting collateral material such as photos and drawings of similar automation equipment or processes we’ve done previously, relevant AEi product/platforms datasheets, and customer references fro similar applications we’ve completed.
After an Order is Placed
To succeed, AEi and your organization must work closely together as a team. In addition to our process, we also have several communication tools that facilitate timely decisions.
As a first step, we will assign a complete team to your project with a team leader. You will also have a specific customer contact person who will always be available to you.
Next, we will have a published project schedule. These schedules incorporate tasks and more importantly show key milestones along the complete timeline of the project. Milestones are very important to meeting the overall delivery schedule of the project. Achieving them requires timely feedback and decision-making from both AEi and customer members of the project team.
During a project, there will be at least four formal signoff documents. These are usually formal meetings where the status of the project is explained clearly to the customer to make sure that expectations are being met. These are functional specification, design review, preliminary acceptance at AEi facility and final acceptance at the customer site.
Weekly conference calls are strongly recommended to review schedules, issues and deliverables. Face-to-face meetings are always preferable, but with customers around the world this is not always practical. AEI uses feature-rich web conferencing technologies to facilitate full, interactive communication and collaboration with multiple locations. These tools allow us to share applications in real time, share documents for online review or editing and share ideas on an online whiteboard. AEi also uses full duplex conference phones for more natural conference-room to conference-room conversations.
The exchange of documents is facilitated through firewalled secure ftp servers. Customers get access to a password protected standard Windows directory structure where shared data can be stored. All members of the project team can be assured that they are always looking at the latest version of the data.
Change is inevitable with projects. Important documents and issues are logged within an Engineering Note. Each Engineering Note is given a sequential Engineering Note Number, and is tracked to closure. This way, important information cannot get overlooked within the myriad of emails we all receive every day.
Once your project is complete, you will receive comprehensive documentation including drawings, schematics, maintenance schedules, part numbers, etc. All documentation will be provided in both electronic and physical versions. The purpose of this documentation is for the customer to be able to maintain and support the automation system throughout its life. We believe that the customer should have the choice of whether to come back to AEI, not be forced to. Therefore, we supply very comprehensive documentation with every machine. We also warranty our work for one year after acceptance.