Campbell Scientific’s organizational chart comes from a similar one I saw a number of years ago in an article written by an airline executive. The common element of both charts is the placement of the customer in the center.
Campbell Scientific is an instrument manufacturer, and as such, the primary functions that add value for customers are marketing (communicate with and give support to the customer), engineering (specify exactly what we make and how we make it), and manufacturing (make it and ship it to the customer). These primary functions are supported by an infrastructure of general management (allocate and coordinate resources), administration (pay the bills), and quality control (set standards and provide quality guidelines and feedback within the organization).
Since our primary means of interfacing the organization to you, the customer, is through our Marketing and Customer Service Department, let me give some more details of how that department is organized. Groups within the department are: Environmental, Water Resources, and Industrial. In addition, there are groups for Order Entry, Customer Service and Repairs, and Software Support. Providing good technical support for our products is a high priority for our application engineers (AEs), as well as familiarity with customers’ applications for the products.
This first line of application engineering support for customers is backed with more specialized groups. There is particular demand for technical support of PC software that runs with Campbell Scientific dataloggers like the CR10X. The software support group provides a nucleus of expertise to the AEs, and the group also takes the lead on new software design, on-line help, and testing.
We have organized our phone and e-mail systems to make your contact with an application engineer in the applicable market as efficient as possible. The business you do with the company will usually be conducted through one or two individuals with whom you establish contact and dialog. It helps us to serve you better if you can identify with one of our primary marketing groups and consistently direct your communication, whether it be by phone, e-mail, or fax, to the same person until the transaction is completed or the issue at hand is resolved.
The Internet has provided significant advances in communications. If you haven’t visited our Web site recently, I encourage you to browse and see where you can find application notes to augment our technical support for your work. There are manuals on the Web site for most of our peripheral products. Tutorials are available if you are just getting started or need to refresh your familiarity with our dataloggers. E-mail may be generally directed to our webmaster, but it is helpful to identify the application so the reply may be made by the application specialist in that area.
Our application engineers have opportunities for face-to-face communication with customers at trade shows, providing training courses, or when providing site consultation services.
I hope that your experience getting information from us is positive and efficient by whatever means you choose.
