Meet Team Member Nick Crevcoure

Nick has been with Energenencs in technical sales covering a territory of Illinois and Southern Wisconsin for the past three years.

What type of work did you do before Energenecs?

I worked at Badger Meter where I was a quality engineer. Working at Badger Meter helped me understand the water industry. They make residential water meters, which measure water coming into your house to establish your water bill. I met my wife at Badger Meter and she still works there. Then I moved on to Johnson Controls working in the building automation department because I wanted to be in sales. Johnson Controls makes controllers for large buildings, (commercial real estate, schools) and is a HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) market company. In some ways, my HVAC controls experiences prepared me for the water/wastewater business. .

What do you like about the water industry?

We are definitely providing a service that everyone needs and uses. Water and wastewater is always going to be an essential business. Projects and upgrades can be delayed, but you can only delay for so long. Eventually all equipment, controls, software and processes need to be maintained in order to provide the essential service.

Can you walk me through your process?

Basically, it’s a lot of coordination and preparing detailed cost information! There are two different types of projects and proposals we provide. One of them is bids. Typically a consulting engineering firm is involved and designs a control project. Bids are then advertised with plans and specifications and lists one or more system integrators, like Energenecs. The other type of projects we provide are direct with cities and villages to upgrade their control infrastructure. 50%, if not more, of our business is working directly with utility clients.

Working with Engineering Firms

We have excellent relationships with many consulting engineers including Donohue & Associates, SEH, McMahon Group, MSA, Cedar, CBS2, Robinson Engineering, Fehr Graham, Rempe Sharpe, and others.

If a city hires an engineering firm, let’s say they want to upgrade their wastewater plant, and they want some new equipment and controls. They pay the engineering firm to review what they have and then make recommendations of what new equipment or processes they should replace or upgrade. The engineer firm then develops plan, drawings and specifications to support their design and what needs to be provided. They also put together a budget for the city, the city approves that budget, which is published, so any contractor can bid on it. The general contractors that tend to bid prime, which means they are responsible for scheduling and running the whole project.

Often the engineering firm will list us as an approved control system integrator and the contractors that are bidding will contact us for a quote for our portion of the project. There is a general contractor, and sub contractors. I work with the electrical contractors and supply a proposal to the electrical contractors. My job is to review the plans and specs and talk to electrical contractors regarding what they are doing and what we are responsible for to make sure we have everything covered.

The engineer specifies manufacturers for various instruments and each piece of equipment, which I then get a quote from one of our many suppliers. In addition, the difficult part is to estimate the labor for an entire control project. I estimate the cost of our panels, so we have to figure out all the devices they want including electrical equipment like VFDs (variable frequency drives) or MCCs (motor control centers)

Direct Bids to Clients

I can also provide a control system proposal directly to a city. Let’s say they want to upgrade six lift station control panels, because they are old and unreliable. In those cases, I’ll go out to the site and meet with the operator, or superintendent and we will go to each site to look at them, take pictures, listen to their concerns, and discuss technical specifics. Then I’ll detail what we are going to provide in a proposal directly to a city.

We have many utility clients we have serviced for quite some time, in some cases, our Energenecs SCADA technicians have been with the same customers for over 10 years working on their systems. They have established a very good relationship with the city and enjoy a thorough understanding of their particular system and its unique attributes.

Our programmers and technicians are onsite often and notice their controllers or software is obsolete. We don’t make the hardware, Allen Bradley does as an example, and they obsolete certain product lines. Often in our water wastewater market if a controller is over fifteen years old it might be obsolete. The concern being if something were to happen with the obsolete product, its more difficult to obtain parts quickly and it’s usually expensive. We are continually working with existing customers with old equipment and software in some cases installed twenty years ago. An important aspect of my job is to contact them, meet with them on site and put together a proposal to meet their needs.

What services does Energenecs provide that clients might not be familiar with?

We do a lot more than just PLC (programmable logic control) panels. I would say many of our customers and some consulting engineering firms do not realize we have a full panel UL shop and we have been doing custom large MCCs and VFDs for 15-20 years. We are unique in our market because control guys like me have access to many programmers, electrical engineers, master electricians, and also we have staff of water/wastewater engineers who understand wastewater process systems, pump stations, in great detail.

Working with the Team

Our Energenecs programmers and field technicians are extremely important, because they are the ones on site listening and doing the tough work. Each town tends to have a dedicated programmer so if I am going to see a customer I’ll call the Energenecs team member who services that customer and they will let me know specifics of what’s going on. Once we have the projects, I work with the Energenecs project managers to make sure they understand our clients expectations and to make sure we have it done to meet a schedule. II want to make sure Energenecs and the customer are on the same page and we do everything to provide good value.