How Far Does Technology Integration Experience Get You?

Why does experience matter? It gets you invited to the Netherlands, for one thing.

ACS has a client for whom we’ve integrated 4 different homes. It just so happens that the client’s 5th home is a 95-ft yacht…and it’s being built in Amsterdam. You can’t win them all, right? Well…

While the client explored integration options overseas, a priority for the family was for the controls within the yacht to have the same look and feel as the other homes on which ACS had previously worked. This meant viewing the same menu – regardless of the location – to set the music or raise the shades or view the status of any room in that home or across the globe. To aid in this endeavor, the client brought their world-renowned yacht builder to Los Angeles to review the systems in the 85,000 sqr ft home in Beverly Hills (which also happened to be the most recent work ACS had completed on their behalf).

This location has the advantage of the features that have made ACS a Crestron Gold programmer. More than a decade of development has gone into our template, featuring options many integrators don’t make available as their base offering. ACS has found it’s easier to include more options (and edit out what isn’t optimal for the client) rather than add what we consider basic functions at an additional cost. To demonstrate, the client took quite a bit of pleasure adjusting the volume in surrounding rooms while we conducted our meeting, as well as showing off the “home-at-a-glance” feature that displays the status of every zone from a single screen.

After the meeting, ACS was asked to review the company chosen for the integration overseas. Frankly, it was a quality organization, and we didn’t feel it made sense for us to be involved to any greater degree. However, there’s a peace-of-mind component to all such work. So, when the client offered to fly us to Amsterdam for 3 days to review the system with the chief engineer, who were we to argue?

At that point, ACS was assisting the client as a technology representative to ensure the family received all the A/V integration and control they’d come to expect, and that all their homes functioned exactly the same. We reviewed the plans, products and functionality, so we could guarantee their experience was consistent in every home. Plus we got to enjoy a few lovely Netherland nights at the same time.

While this is an extreme case, it is representative of how involved ACS becomes with every project. So much forethought has gone into our standard programming templates, we are called back in for new work far more often than to upgrade or augment a completed system.

Something to keep in mind when considering which integration specialist you want to hire for your home, and it doesn’t have to be a yacht or mansion. Do you want the functions you desire most to be a standard part of the integration, or something to be added later (and at a higher cost)? When you’re ready to discover more of how decades of experience can work for you, don’t hesitate to give us a call here at ACS. We have the experience AND we travel.