I’ve just been talking about startups, and here is news from a startup within an established engineering company. Wunderlich-Malec Engineering Inc. (WM) is an engineering services company that had built a handy little maintenance tool for itself and some clients.

A new business development director entered the company and asked why didn’t they turn it into a product and sell it. After some further development work, WM VIP Services was created. VIP stands for Virtual Information Portal.

This mobile app for iPad and Microsoft tablets has been designed to improve efficiency and increase productivity by serving information to a maintenance technician, engineer, or manager who might happen to be out in the plant and need some contextual information served quickly.

“For over 33 years, WM’s success has been built around our strong customer commitment. VIP Services® solidifies this commitment by helping our customers reduce unscheduled downtime and increase productivity.” says Neal Wunderlich, President WM.

Here are some features gleaned from the press release.

Reducing Downtime – Time is often lost when technicians leave the work area to find resources, such as schematics, procedures or other data to complete a task.

VIP Services – Links all equipment to all its relevant data and information resources. It provides specific and accurate information for the technician at the equipment where needed information is time critical.

Improving Communication for Quicker Decision Making – Communications about production downtime issues and their resolution using traditional channels (email or phone) is often unclear or delayed until the correct resource can come onsite and ‘see’ the issue in real time.

VIP Services – Shows the problem, complete with all relevant process data and resources to the subject matter expert who can support the local technician with better communications for quicker problem resolution.

“We are very excited about our VIP Services Initiative. We feel that our new mobile application will greatly aide our customers in their pursuit to save time and money.” says Joel Gil, Director of Business Development, VIP Services Business Unit, WM.

Wunderlich-Malec has created a new VIP Services business unit headquartered in Houston, Texas. Our VIP Services Core Team will deliver complete turnkey VIP Services® Solutions.

The system works by printing and applying a “Point of Interest” QR code label at a POI—machine or unit or device. The services team can help accumulate all the relevant drawings and documentation about that POI and serve it up when the technician scans the QR code with the tablet camera.

Pretty elegant solution for not a lot of integration expense.