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Z-Partners, Inc. is a USA based holding company specializing in the marketing and distribution of mineral based products for a number of regrigerated and frozen commercial, industrial and transportation applications.

Their main product, ShelfLife™, when placed in any refrigerated or frozen space with food adsorbs and retains odors as well as excess water vapor and microorganisms that cause spoilage, mold, mildew, icing and high energy bills. Shelf Life Distributors produces and markets a range of branded products to address many specific applications, including keeping mushrooms fresh, extending the life of live shellfish, transporting long-haul onions and apples in the same truck, eliminating the ice on equipment and the refer floor, or just reducing power bills.

ShelfLife Distributors also offer a simple, inexpensive and foolproof way to evaluate the performance of walk in coolers and freezers. fourtec products are used to establish certified test results and document real-time operation profiles. Using fourtec software and data logging they have developed a testing program that suits customer's needs and which will ensure that they can know and prove what is going on in their operations.

What unique collaborative benefits could fourtec solutions offer ShelfLife products?
Over time we have produced a great deal of anecdotal evidence supporting the efficacy of ShelfLife products. The problem we continued to encounter was the lack of empirical evidence which supported our claims and was specific to the client's situation, compelling and irrefutable. The only way to obtain these data was to spend the time observing and recording specific responses to our product in the client's environment.

You've mentioned that your objective is to be the "most sophisticated and effective firm in the industry", what do you think reassures your customers that you are able to fulfill that role?
Our interest and strength is solving difficult refrigeration problems for large, sophisticated, clients. In order to be credible with our target market, we have to play the game on their terms. That means total professionalism, credible data, documented financial and operational results and the ability to provide real solutions to their problems - not another "band-aid". Energy costs and product loss in refrigerated spaces are major drains on everyone's P&L. In very large organizations the numbers become huge. We provide products that work but we have to be ready to prove their importance to their bottom line every time we call on a new prospect.

How have fourtec products helped you enhance your professional credibility by providing the figures and facts your clients need?
We include fourtec loggers and software in our distributor program as well as providing training on how to interpret the data. Also, we are in the process of ramping up a monitoring and testing division which will focus, exclusively on analyzing large refrigerated applications then providing ongoing real-time monitoring, data collection and analysis after installation of ShelfLife products. We are so committed to this program, that we offer the fourtec equipment and our ongoing services as an adjunct to our proposals at no cost to the client other than their standard contract for our products. This will provide us with a huge body of information over time which no competitor can match. As a policy, we will not recommend any solution to even our smallest client until we have monitored his coolers or freezers for at least a week without our products and a week with them. This establishes an invaluable benchmark for contract negotiations and the ongoing value of our products.

How are fourtec products relevant to your current projects?
We are currently in discussion with one major California firm that operates over a million cubic feet of chilled (pre-process) storage and 7 million cubic feet of flash freezers and frozen storage. In order to diagnose the conditions that have for years, produced glacial ice deposits we deployed a series of fourtec devices to collect "baseline" data and then followed up with the ShelfLife product. The records collected by the fourtec instruments allowed us to infer a wide range of operational data including, compressor on/off cycles and run time, frost point collisions (with temperature), defrost frequency, duration and temperature, energy consumption, door operations and other factors critical to this client's operations and costs.When presented with graphical illustrations, the raw data set and our proprietary statistical abstract and analysis the results are irrefutable and compelling.

Similar test cycles are now under way in the food services, operations of prison systems across two large states and preliminary proposals have been made to the US General Services Administration.

We are also currently developing test protocols with a highly respected US University's Food Sciences Department. The scope of the research will include investigations of environmental responses to the introduction of ShelfLife products, ranging from it's effect on energy consumption, to control of water activity in fresh foods, to retardation of microbial growth in treated spaces. With energy costs soaring and current concern over the safety of the food chain the potential of an independent research project verifying the effectiveness of a system that's simple, inexpensive and safe is of vital interest to the industry as a whole. This study will provide a test, not only of our products, but of fourtec's.

How have fourtec ensured their systems worked for you?
fourtec equipment was far superior to anything else we found. I was amazed to find the sales representative so forthcoming and enthusiastic about helping us solve these problems given the "take-it-or-leave-it" reception I had found elsewhere. And, the support and enthusiasm he received from the rest of the fourtec team was, and remains, remarkable. Calculating Dew Point and exporting files to Excel in Fahrenheit are a couple of examples of changes to the software that were accomplished, literally, within days of our request. Amazing response time! And, it all worked!

What priorities affected your decision making process in choosing a solution?
We Beta tested Decagon and Cox instruments and looked at everyone we could find over a period of six or eight months. Insurmountable problems seemed to exist with the other competitors. Either the device or the software (or both) failed to give us what we needed. As I said, our business is solving major problems for major clients. When we first looked at fourtec we encountered some of the same problems we saw in other products. The singular difference with fourtec, is that they approached our business needs the same way we approach those of our clients...they got on our team and helped us solve them. As for cost, fourtec is often less expensive, sometimes much less expensive, than instruments that don't work as well and which have seriously inferior software capabilities for our use. The other big issue has to be reliability and repeatability. Because we normally use multiple loggers in each application and because we record a continuous data set before and after application of our products it is imperative that instrument calibration and performance is consistent from one instrument to the next. By the time we complete a testing cycle, we may have a month or more invested in the data. If it's not there when we download, it gets expensive in time, money and credibility. The fourtec loggers have a perfect reliability record, so far and we could not be more pleased with the consistency of the recorded data between instruments.
...So in choosing fourtec it's hardware & software capability, service and cooperation in jointly developing solutions to our unique problems, reliability, consistency and cost - in that order.

You have said that "Between your proprietary abstracting and analytical software and the help of the fourtec team we now have the most advanced collection, analysis and presentation capabilities in the industry" Can you explain at the application level how fourtec systems have combined with your company's systems?
We run an MS Windows XP Pro 2002 DS3 LAN. A very large part of our business is done on-line or in multi-media protocols. Many of the other systems have interface problems with XP which would have forced us to run an older, less feature rich, operating system for this application. Many will not export directly to Excel. Still others produce raw data in ASCII and, therefore, require extensive manipulation before it can be accumulated, abstracted, analyzed or displayed in any usable format. As a computer illiterate, I needed our software to be feature and graphically rich, easy to use and intuitive.

We, especially like the ease of using the "graph copy" capability to interface to html, pdf and MS Word files which allows us to seamlessly present the data in any format required to feed E-Mail, our commercial printing contractor, hard copy correspondence or web site.