We recently had the opportunity to sit down and talk D3M with Phil Ovenden, a Senior Radio System Technician at Talk Wireless in St. Catherines, Ontario. With nearly two decades of experience in the two-way radio industry and a regular D3M power-user, Phil offered up some great suggestions and features. Find out more below.
What do your daily activities entail?
Troubleshooting, assisting the other technicians, assist the sales team to quote jobs by creating system diagrams in D3M.
Who within your organization is using D3M?
Currently, our technicians are using it and our sales reps are starting to use it.
Prior to D3M, what tools were you and your dealership using to design and document two-way radio networks?
That’s a good question. We’ve been using Excel, Visio and Microsoft Paint.
How has your organization implemented D3M into the process of creating & managing your radio networks?
We are just at the infancy of this. We’re still tied to our own system where everything is currently operating through Excel. We’re moving from our Excel world into D3M. We use D3M when a customer asks for a system and we’re getting ready to quote it, we use D3M to draw it up. We’re not using the second portion yet for the database. Hopefully, we will get there. We’re using it more for images.
For quoting purposes, are you using the D3M sales proposal?
Right now we are exporting the diagrams. Mainly it is the familiarity of using it. Basically, when I’m working with the Sales Team, I share a drawing with them and they can look at it and add items. It’s nice to have that real-time sharing. I export the pictures to PDF.
What information within a codeplug is most relevant to you and do you store that information in D3M?
D3M is collecting that information pretty well – radio ID, serial number, model number – then the system, whether it’s conventional, Capacity Plus, Connect Plus, analog/digital. We store that information in an Excel spreadsheet. For our Capacity Plus system, we have all of our customers in one spreadsheet.
What feature do you like best about D3M?
I like being able to move things around easily. Zooming in and out, and being able to make the picture grow as you need to add more to it.
What is the most significant benefit of using D3M?
Speed and clarity. Being able to put your system into visual representation very quickly.
Are there any additional feature you would like to see in D3M?
You guys are coming out with the rack layout and that will be handy. I’m looking forward to that. D3M is coming along pretty well. Also, providing a global database of icons would be nice, instead of just the current 17.
Would you recommend D3M to a friend in the industry?
Yes.
Can you finish this sentence, “D3M has been beneficial to Talk Wireless because…”
We’ve been able to complete an overview of a system in a matter of minutes. It helps with documentation.
