01/24/08

Telmar Noyes Avenue photographs and stories.

Click on the small images to see a larger photograph (4 pages):

Telmar Noyes Avenue

Page | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |

Telmar Noyes Avenue exterior.	Lois Weyler in the office. Granville and Mark behind the screens!	Sue Lowenthal.
Mark Manganella.	Eric Masters, in the Pennsylvania office.	Chuck Hoyt, and Becky when she worked in the PA office.
Becky, note the Topics screen.	Chris Kirkup and Mark Manganella outside the Apics building.	Gary signing a Bell Atlantic contract.
Craig and Becky.	Dierdre, Mark, Becky and Robert Arias.	Telmar Sacramento offce. Mel Santi, Granville Kirkup, Vi Barrett, Jerry Constance.

Generated by JAlbum 6.2  |  Chameleon skin by LazaDezign  |  Top of page

Photo tip:  Click on the first photo to enlarge it, then press the spacebar to run a slide show!

• We would have a 'company lunch' every Friday.  At first we would go out for lunch, but this proved to be too disruptive as the company grew, so we would have Friday lunch catered.  We always had free sodas and drinks for everyone, and after-work get-togethers on many Fridays.

• Ken Mockett and his company were one of our secret weapons.  We had no idea how to design and build offices, warehouse racking, clean rooms, or test labs, but Ken always knew.  He would deliver our infrastructure professionally and on time.  We need a climate-controlled lab to house a switch?  (A huge piece of telecom equipment).  We would just think it and it would be done.

• Topics began as an equipment search program.  Then we added order processing, and separately warehouse shipping and labeling.  As the company grew, we joined the various parts together, into a nicely integrated system.  We adding networking and email, and a direct 'Zap' link to our Pennsylvania sales office.  Many people were involved in the design of Topics.  I would get a memo or a visit from Mark, Sue, Becky, Rich, sometimes Eric.  They would start with, "It would be really cool if..."   I would listen and go away and design it.  I did all of my Topics programming at home in the evening, often until 2am (that did my marriage no good at all).  There was little that could not be done in a night or two, and I would come back to the office and load the Topics update onto everyone's computer through the network.   Each time we got a new customer, we could adapt Topics to exactly match their forms and systems.

• Topics developed into a sort of Google for the telecom equipment market - from one screen we could see any company's inventory.  For any item we could see the whole industry's wants, and our own sales, purchases, substitutes, bids and pricing history.  Other companies would often call us and ask, "Do we have this in inventory?  It takes too long to look it up on our system!"

• For some years I handled all purchasing for inventory.  Other companies would go and look at material being offered for bid, but we never needed to do this.  We had a Topics report called a 'Prebid', which would show the historical sales and wants, inventory and pricing information for each item.  You could quickly run a prebid on any list of material we were offered, and create a bid to purchase.  In that way, we only purchased material that was saleable.  You could look at a prebid and visually see the interesting items - they would jump out at you.  Later, Rich came up through the warehouse, and took over inventory purchasing.  He suggested improvements to the prebid, and was even better than I was - he would often have material sold before he bought it.  Later we added a 'Postbid' report - we could evaluate the effectiveness of any bid, and measure the return in sales of that material - a good metric.  We could also see month-by-month returns on all bids.

• As part of Topics, we had airport-style overhead sales monitors in the sales office, warehouse and test labs.  These would show sales as they came in, and their status as they passed through the system - New, Warehouse, Shipped, Billed, etc.  Each status was a different color, so you could see at a glance how many orders were new, in the warehouse, shipped, etc.  Also on the sales monitors was a section showing our sales and gross margin for the week, month and year-to-date, as well as the monthly bonus amount.  All of this was updated once per minute.  When Stonebridge came to see us, they were impressed, not only that we could calculate our year-to-date gross margin up to the minute, but that everyone in the company could see it.  Everyone's bonus was reflected by the sales monitors.

• Because the overhead sales monitors were static - just new sales popping up and changing colors occasionally, I added graphs showing our weekly and monthly sales.  I added a red 'Taco Bell Menu' which would flash up for a few seconds on occasions.  This became a sort of urban myth - some people had seen it, but most had not.  I would see people standing in front of the overhead monitors for several minutes, trying to catch it!   Later I added the arrivals screen from Orange County Airport, which would flash up for a few seconds!   The overhead monitors would play music when a sale came in - a few seconds, getting longer with increasing sales amounts.  A million dollar sale would play 'charge' for 30 seconds, and everyone would cheer!   So why do all of this stuff?   Everyone regarded Telmar as their own company.  When a sale came in at 5pm, the warehouse guys would not complain, they would pack it and take it to Fedex themselves.

• It was a few days after 9/11.  Telmar's new president, John Kidwell, had gathered everyone together in the lunch room to talk about the awful events in New York and Washington.  Several people spoke.  Then Ayman got up and said that he we all knew that he was from a different culture, but he supported the United States as much as everyone else  - he is a proud Muslim from Syria.  Everyone in the company stood up and applauded him!

Back to top of page