Employee Corner: Mike Korinko, Senior Engineer
Mike’s extensive knowledge and achievement with Crestron control system programming has been built thorough hard work, dedication, and experience during his eight years with Control Concepts and his 15 years in the audiovisual industry leading up to joining the CCI Team. Through Mike’s work on complex projects and critical situations at CCI, he has successfully established relationships with many long-term partners helping him to diagnose and troubleshoot situations, both onsite and remotely.
In house, Mike has developed code modules for use by the CCI technical team to simplify project implementation, improve quality, and provide value-added features and efficient turnaround for our customers.
On the development side, what are you most excited to participate in as part of the Control Concepts Team?
We work through all aspects of a system: the physical design of the system, touchpanel design and programming, to make cohesive systems. I am excited about the ways that Control Concepts is becoming more of a resource for our customers to move forward with those systems.
What little things go into a successful project- what do you do for clients beyond conventional expectations for programmers?
To start, we review the entire design of a project to try to resolve issues before they arise. Our experience lets us anticipate outcomes and plan systems that give the customer flexibility.
We go through channels to point out and resolve issues before a system is already in and we work to figure it out on the back side.
The CCI Team doesn’t take projects at face value… our concern is making sure the customer has a fully operational system that gives them what they need.
Often, we find that customers don’t really know what features they have and what their systems can do. We help them understand what they have in their system and what they can and cannot do with it.
We hope that this understanding means that the customers utilize their systems more. This can be beneficial through continuing to update systems and to make them into what the customers want them to be. The ability to follow up is helpful… the layers get stripped away when you work with customers directly to give them exactly what they need.
The work you do with CCI is more than just programming, can you speak to that?
We provide programming and design, maintenance and support services to consultants and end users who value all that we bring to the table.
Customers should not feel limited in what they can hire us to do outside of what we have done for them in the past. CCI is changing to meet these newly identified needs and our relationships can be expanded to include more than programming alone. The relationships that we have with customers blend consultative work with programming services.
What is it like working directly with end users?
End users are gravitating towards us; they recognize Control Concepts as a key component of a project. The more we can communicate directly with end users, the more we can tailor systems to specific needs and desires to make them more usable and functional
When we have that end user relationship, we can review and update old systems and give users what they need. It’s surprising how many people have existing systems they’re not happy with or that don’t function properly. There can be initial trepidation in these circumstances… if the users don’t have the system they hoped for or the system they thought they would be getting … our job is to put their minds at ease. This can be done better than what they’ve got and we can be the company that does for them.
In cases like you just described, how do end users benefit from working with CCI?
CCI helps make the most of the end user’s investment. CCI looks to take the user’s needs into consideration first and works to determine optimal solutions that can improve upon what they already have in place without having to change whole systems.
And when end users get systems they are happy with, they are more inclined to put in additional systems down the road.
How does that one-on-one relationship benefit customers over time?
There is always continuing maintenance that goes on and that helps end users understand what types of resources they have. Equipment is always evolving so there may be small changes they can make that can really improve their experience. Because we work with the equipment all of the time, we can connect customers to what works best for them and can educate them on how to use the equipment. A lot more end users are starting to see this as a continuing partnership and so are the integrators and consultants.
What is it like to work on the CCI Team?
We have a really solid team of engineers here and there is a lot of behind the scenes collaboration and sharing knowledge. We benefit from that and our customers do, too.
