A few months ago, another machine vision blogger commented (only partially tongue-in-cheek) that the machine vision market must be down because there was an increase in the number of magazine articles being submitted by machine vision professionals (me included). He suggested that we must have extra time on our hands due to lack of business. Perhaps…..
In the same spirit (of making an only partially flippant observation), I’ve noted that machine vision manufacturers seem to be on a particular mission right now to sign up systems integrators. Might we presume that since business is very slow, there is a big push to get more of those “integrator demo kits” sold in order to boost the monthly order count?
I don’t necessarily think that’s exactly the case, but it’s a reminder of a significant issue that’s been around in this industry as long as machine vision has been integrated by third party companies. The problem we’re talking about is that the manufacturing base sometimes only sees the integration channel as a sales channel. Some machine vision product manufacturers think that if they sign up more integrators it will produce more sales. With some exceptions, this strategy has never been very productive. The people who integrate machine vision technology are enablers, not great sellers. The market chain works best when these integration entities are utilized to their best value: the application of the technology.
Distribution in the machine vision market has not worked so well recently either. Perhaps it indeed is time for the manufacturers to re-visit the idea of focusing on creating opportunity through in-house sales efforts, with integrators as partners who help “close” the deal by providing a solution that is built upon the component offering. Maybe that already is the idea behind the push to sign up integrator partners…..I hope so.
David
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