Honeywell Analytics is an amalgamation of eight different gas detection companies acquired by Honeywell since 2005. Gas detection was seen by Honeywell as a strategic adjacency to its life safety business, which already had a successful track record. Offering gas detection has given Honeywell the opportunity to better serve our customers across many industries.
Today, Honeywell Analytics is the global leader in gas detection with nine distinct manufacturing sites and 10 office-warehouse locations.
What has been your company’s business strategy?
Our strategy is focused on investing in three key areas: product, people, and customers.
First and foremost, we’re about making products that will protect the lives of workers so they return home safely to their families. In addition to this paramount focus on safety, we design our products with the view of helping our customers be more productive and predictable in their daily routine and jobs. Our goal is to bring to market innovative, reliable products that work out of the box, are differentiated from competitive offerings, are easy to service, operate and maintain, and reduce the lifetime cost of ownership to our customers.
People are an important focus. Our strategy is to employ and retain the best talent in the industry, and instill in them a customer-focused attitude and behavior. We empower our people to succeed through the Honeywell culture of growth, intelligent risk-taking and other disciplined behaviors.
In the past two years, after really looking at our business closely, we’re more focused than ever on providing the most valuable customer experience possible. We want to be the easiest company to do business with, the company that’s enjoyable to do business with.
Describe the core branded products of your company.
Our core products are the BW Technologies by Honeywell brand and the RAE Systems by Honeywell brand.
We promote BW as a brand because BW has been the market leader and innovator for single-gas detection for many years. The yellow-colored housing is synonymous with single-gas detectors industry-wide.
RAE Systems is the innovative, technology-focused brand leader within the industry. The RAE line adds capabilities such as networking, intelligent data collection and rapid deployment through wireless connectivity. As Honeywell Analytics evolves its business strategy to serve the Connected Worker, the RAE Systems by Honeywell brand will figure strongly in providing the optimized solution.
How do distributors contribute to your success?
We sell through our distributor network; we do not sell direct to the end user. So distributors are critical to our success. We view our distributors as partners in our business.
Do you offer distributors training and other value-added services?
We understand that gas detection isn’t the only thing they sell; in many cases they’re selling a vast array of equipment. So we provide market data and other know-how to help them grow the gas detection portion of their business. When our distributors are aligned to our goals and our strategy of providing the best quality service and support, we feel there’s no better competitive advantage we can offer.
Do you have any recent news to report?
We recently opened a Customer Excellence Center in Pasadena, Texas, near Houston. It’s a first-of-its kind, life safety training center. It focuses on the solutions we offer from a gas detection and safety perspective to support the oil and gas and other industries we sell into. We located it close to where most of our customer base is.
Secondly, a year and half into Honeywell’s acquisition of RAE Systems, we now feel we have a great team in place. We’re taking RAE’s world-class product and bringing it to market in a significant new way.
I’ll give you one example. We’re taking the RAE Systems technology forward with our new, ConneXt wireless gas detection products. ConneXt is a suite of wireless products — ConneXt Pack, ConneXt Pro and ConneXt Plus. It’s the industry’s first plant-wide, deployable wireless gas detection system to add radiation-detection instrumentation, biometrics, GPS, and WiFi or Mesh wireless radio signaling. ConneXt Safety Solutions combines 24/7 remote atmospheric monitoring, GPS-based man-down tracking and real-time data delivery to a central location, resulting in improved emergency response, risk reduction and plant productivity.
Describe your current financial picture.
The overall financial picture for Honeywell Analytics is very solid. Over the past five years, Honeywell Analytics has grown at about twice the rate as the market we serve.
We have more than 200 engineers dedicated to gas detection, globally. They are focused on innovating the next generation of gas detection and sensing capabilities, products that are certified to the most stringent standards around the globe. When it comes to a device or product that is intended to protect a worker’s life, we’re not going to short-cut anything. We aim to ensure that the piece of equipment that they’re wearing will, without a shadow of a doubt, protect them from injury.
What should distributors know about your company’s future?
Our goal is to become the easiest company to do business with. I hope that the industry will see that we’re investing in the best people. And our products will become increasingly focused on the end-user experience — ultimately we want every customer experience to be a delightful one.
ConneXt will be the first deployable set of gas detectors that require no downloads, but come with everything, including software, loaded. All the end user has to do is hit the button and it’s up and running.
Essentially a distributor will be able to place an order that will include a Pelican case with all the gas detectors they need, an Echo router, with the instruments programmed to work out of the box, with no manual manipulation of software or data. They will open the box, turn the units on and turn Echoview on, and everything is ready to roll. That’s a first in industry, and will be a significant play in confined industry and upstream drilling. Their customers will be able to start the job quicker. They’ll know in real time whether someone is in danger.
We’ll also release our new maintenance-free single gas detector in January, the BW Clip. It will offer the industry’s fastest bump testing, with IntelliDox, which will be released alongside it in January.
The business is embarking on a new strategy that I mentioned before called the Connected Worker. We’ll provide a full suite of products from personal protective equipment to gas detection that will connect that worker. Customers will get feedback from gas detection, biometrics and more. Our offerings will connect the worker holistically and enable them to run plant operations in a safer, more productive way.
