One of the customer experiences I often tell is that of one of our long time customers, Cooke Aquaculture. When I tell someone how IT positively impacted Cooke's business, the person at the other end of the conversation undoubtedly says "Wow that is so cool!" Let's see what you think.

During a consulting engagement with Cooke, one of our VoIP engineers was walking the halls of some of the Cooke facilities asking questions.  All part of our way of investing in our customers and taking the time to learn what is they do and how we might be able to help.  During that walkabout they came across a temperature gauge in a closet.  Our IT expert asked, "What's that for?"   That's all it took really.

We soon discovered that for years Cooke had been monitoring the temperature of the water manually at all of its pen sites to ensure that the water did not go below a certain temperature.  That temperature to my recollection is -2 degrees Celsius.  At which point, if you feed or disturb the Atlantic salmon in the pens, they literally just flop over and die.  Sounds crazy but it's a phenomenon called super chill and scientists for years have not been able to figure out why this happens.

Having recently just installed a new VoIP system for Cooke, our IT expert asked whether or not that information pumped back to a central site and then distributed to all the phones in real time would be useful.  Would it ever!    Today, executives, biologists and those who need to know can monitor the temperature of pens throughout Atlantic Canada just by hitting a few buttons on the phone.

This has the potential of saving the company money through no lost fish and less people needed to manually monitor the pens.   Our application development team developed the application for the phone over a couple weeks, tested it and implemented it at Cooke's request.

Pretty cool eh!  It doesn't have to be something complicated it just needs to be something that has real business value and investing in your customer by spending time to understand their business allows us to differentiate from our competitors.   This is just one of many examples where these types of technologies can benefit a company.