The fervent growth of the wireless industry has turned into a gold mine of opportunities for Safco Technologies Inc.
The Chicago-based company develops and provides automated signal strength testing products and has seen its business grow at a rate of 42 percent for the last seven years. Its success has come from evolving its services to match the industry’s needs, the company said.
Safco’s emphasis on the wireless industry grew out of its expertise in military communications in the early 1980s. Safco, now a subsidiary of Gilbert Associates Inc., originally focused on the difficult process of making air interface measurements for cellular carriers, a task that included understanding the value of signaling between cell sites and the phone, said company President Bruce Creger.
“Safco Technologies created the commercialization of measuring using a cellular transceiver as the eyes and ears of looking into and quantifying a cellular network,” said Creger. “Soon we recognized that measuring data was no longer the challenge, but understanding and analyzing the data was really what our customers were after.”
The company, whose customers include both manufacturers and cellular network operators like Motorola Inc. and Ameritech Cellular Services, began focusing on software development to create programs that perform analyses of signal data. Safco is now a Windows developer and provider of real-time embedded software, and the company is moving away from the engineering side of its business to pursue more opportunities in evaluating marketing and sales.
“Originally for technical consumption, beginning about seven years ago, wireless began the proliferation of technology in various forms of analog and various forms of digital. This caused us to recognize that we’re really in the information technology business and that measurement products and analytic software were the tools to provide our customers with not only technical knowledge, but marketing and sales information as well,” said Creger.
And that business has taken another step forward as personal communications services providers have begun entering the market to compete with incumbent cellular providers for the first time.
“The recent successes of the PCS auction and the enormous investment in deploying PCS technologies is driving all wireless providers to assess not only technologies, but also a competitor in each market,” said Creger. “This directed us to focus on benchmarking as the basic product and technologies go.”
The company recently teamed up with J.D. Power and Associates to jointly produce studies that will report on the performance of quality of wireless providers’ networks from a customer’s perspective. The reports will combine customer satisfaction studies with call quality studies for a variety of targeted networks.
“Our plan is to jointly provide insight into why a consumer provided the answers given and to assess the wireless networks in developing consumer response strategy in terms of capital deployment schemes, engineering, planning and marketing programs,” said Creger. “We can tell you relative to your competition if you have a bad mark in dropped calls. We can give a rather precise picture as to some likely reasons why you got good or bad marks, which can be put into engineering and marketing programs and measure those successes against the benchmark.”
Creger said the studies will be valuable to carriers as consumers expect wireless call quality and reliability to be equivalent to wireline service. Carriers can no longer generate revenue simply by expanding coverage.
In the past, “focus on quality of service did not have revenue-producing impact that expansion of service provided,” he said. “Also, markets were divided into semi-monopolistic situations, only two carriers per market, so there was plenty of opportunity to generate revenue so that each carrier had equivalent quality of service without any measurement being applied.”
Safco was formerly the Electronic Systems Division of Safco Corp., but was purchased in September by Gilbert Associates of Reading, Pa., a holding company whose subsidiaries operate in telecommunications equipment and services markets and technical services. Most of the major cellular carriers in North America and more than 38 foreign carriers have deployed the Safco’s products, said Creger.
