Kiosks, cameras, signage, access control systems, and so many connected products stand front-and-center for businesses today. For self-storage, these technologies make facility management easy with only a few key employees.

Self-storage facilities have been early to adopt the use of property tech — or “PropTech” — to support customers, providing easy access to storage units while keeping facilities secure at all times. Facilities use kiosks, cameras, fingerprint readers, smart locks, and access control systems to support daily facility operations.

OpenTech Alliance is a pioneer in the PropTech space. For more than twenty years, OpenTech has developed innovative technology for the self-storage industry, helping businesses grow cost-effectively through high-tech remote facility management. OpenTech’s products include access control, electronic locks, and full-service kiosks. They also offer security monitoring and call center solutions.

OpenTech understands how customers depend on these products and services, which is why for the last two years, the company has worked to automate remote device management using Canopy as their remote monitoring and management platform (RMM).

Recently, Robert Chiti, CEO of OpenTech Alliance, sat down with Canopy Founder and CEO Steve Latham to talk about how OpenTech uses RMM. Over the course of the conversation, the two discussed:

1. Advances in automations for the self-storage industry
2. What managers of self-storage facilities must consider
3. The build vs. buy decision for connected product RMM, as with Canopy
4. How automations support cost-effective growth

Your business may rely on different forms of connected products than those specifically used in self-storage. However, you might be surprised what Chiti — and the OpenTech team — have learned. You might even be able to extend their insights into how your team manages your remote devices.

Do you want to know how automating remote device management works for self-storage? Watch the highlights of Chiti and Latham's conversation below through a short, 8 minute video. Or bookmark and read this article for four insights from the conversation.

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1. Using Remote Device Management to Proactively Manage Self-Storage Facilities

OpenTech Alliance provides connected products to self-storage facilities across the U.S. and Canada, and they are soon expanding to Europe. Like much self-service technology, OpenTech’s connected products rely on hardware and devices such as fingerprint scanners, bill acceptors, cameras, locks, and more.

A lot can go wrong with these kinds of remote devices, leading to product downtime and frustrated customers. In the worst case, downtime means customers are unable to access their property. Robert Chiti shares, "What we’ve learned over the last 21 years is [remote devices] don’t always work."

When remote devices stop working, go down, or fail, the remote device downtime can go unnoticed until customers report an issue, leading to a high mean time to resolution. Far too often by the time connected products are fixed, the customer may have already given up, and the business is lost.

OpenTech Alliance implemented Canopy’s remote monitoring and management platform to ensure their products are always working as designed. They use Canopy to monitor device health and functionality. "Canopy has helped us really have a better understanding of the health of that kiosk and all the devices within it," Chiti shared. 

Their proactive approach, which heavily relies on automating device management wherever possible, has changed how OpenTech operates. Most importantly, it improves the customer experience for OpenTech’s customers, as they enjoy improved facility management operations and quicker resolutions to issues.

2. How Automation Solves Self-Storage Industry Problems

Self-storage businesses, often with only one or two employees, were quick to embrace automation. The nature of the self-storage business model is to do more with less, increasing margin for self-storage operators. But efficiency must be tempered with maintaining or even improving the customer experience.

Traditionally, facility managers oversee everything on-site at a self-storage property. In the words of Chiti, they must know, “What's going on at the property? What happened to the trash guy? Who dumped the stuff over there? Who ran into the gutter? Everything was the manager.” For one person to juggle so many tasks is difficult, which makes using technology to make facility management easier especially appealing.

For example, Chiti relates, “We have people that are saying [how] a small leak at their property, if caught early, is a couple hundred dollars challenge. [But] a big leak when it gets into the rest of the facility — and it gets into the different self storage units — can be a hundreds of thousands of dollars problem.” He suggests that much like fire alarms, “buildings are needing more and more devices to detect what's going on quicker — because there's nobody there, and it could be nobody there for a whole week in some cases.”

Chiti believes that technology like Canopy can provide a real-time command center, a "central nervous system," to self-storage operators, keeping facility owners informed of operations. In many cases, such a command center can even replicate the knowledge previously held by the manager. As Chiti put it, "We can use Canopy to extrapolate [what’s happening at the facility] and bring it back into our own command center," he says. This ensures quicker responses when issues arise.

3. Deciding to Build vs. Buy With Remote Monitoring and Management

OpenTech didn’t always use Canopy for their remote monitoring and management needs.

Before, in order to manage OpenTech’s self-storage technology, their team faced a critical decision: Should they build their own remote monitoring and management solution or “buy” an existing product?

They first chose to “build.” Like many other connected product teams, OpenTech began developing their own proprietary monitoring and management system, thinking it would align better to their needs. Chiti reflected on how they wrestled with this decision, saying, "We built our own status monitor for our kiosks, and while we thought it was good, it wasn’t. You tend to give a lot more leniency to your internal systems.”

But building a proprietary remote monitoring system is no simple matter. It diverts focus and resources away from core business functions. Developing and maintaining such a system requires ongoing investment.

Before using Canopy, Chiti shared how while managing cameras in their facilities, his team found it challenging to detect when cameras weren’t working properly. While OpenTech could monitor their kiosks, they had no out-of-the-box solution for monitoring cameras.

Remote monitoring cameras added a new challenge that the OpenTech product team had to overcome, which brought Chiti and team to reflect, “Are there ways to [monitor cameras]? Yes. And do it easily, inexpensively, and consistently? No.” 

That’s when they found Canopy. They asked about monitoring cameras and learned how Canopy was designed to adapt to manage all kinds of remote devices — kiosks, cameras, and more. 

On learning about what Canopy could do, Chiti realized, “We’re not the only device in the ecosystem, and operators want one dashboard to monitor everything.” Now was the time to “set ego aside,” as Chiti put it, and leverage external expertise. So the team made the decision to “buy” Canopy’s remote monitoring and management capabilities for OpenTech’s technology. 

For most, the decision between building or buying comes down to efficiency. Instead of creating a one-off solution, adopting a platform like Canopy allows for seamless integration across devices, saving time and resources. Better, it makes it easy for the product team to focus on building better products rather than inventing novel ways to monitor and manage them. Best, it ensures the products are always able to lever the leading expertise in remote device management.

• For an overview of the "build vs. buy" RMM decision, check out the Guide on Connected Products. 
• For an in-depth guide, see Build vs. Buy for RMM Solutions.

4. Driving Technical Support Savings by Automating Remote Device Management

Using Canopy to automate remote device management at OpenTech has eliminated much of the pain of remotely monitoring and managing their products. This has been especially true when it comes to addressing issues like driver resets and hardware malfunctions.

For example, Chiti discussed how the OpenTech technical support team uses Canopy to manage Windows-based PCs remotely. "What we've heard from the tech support team is there's a fair amount of drivers on a Windows machine that need to be reset and rebooted.” By automating these tasks, the company has been able to fix issues such as camera malfunctions. They’ve also been able to monitor for temperature-related problems. As Chiti mentioned, "[Canopy] is able to react and run a program on the PC to fix the problem before we even know it."

Automations with Canopy give OpenTech the ability to diagnose and resolve issues in real-time. Remote device automations in Canopy make it possible for OpenTech to increase the number of kiosks they manage without increasing staff, thereby supporting efficient growth without sacrificing quality. "We haven’t reduced any of our staff because of [Canopy], but we are able to manage more kiosks with less people because of [the platform]," shared Chiti.

Chiti went on to comment how his team is energized by working with Canopy as they innovate new ways to use automations for OpenTech products. Automation is expected to continue shaping the future of self-service technology, making it possible for businesses to grow while maintaining high service standards.

Conclusion

OpenTech Alliance is advancing the self-storage industry through their innovative use of self-service technology. Their products make it possible for self-storage facility operators to manage their properties with confidence. 

Over the last two years, OpenTech has advanced their internal connected product capabilities through automating remote device management with Canopy. As Robert Chiti, OpenTech CEO, asserted, automation has enabled them to address issues proactively, often resolving problems before customer’s even know about them.

As self-storage and remote facility management continue to change, OpenTech is ready to advance with it, making the most of technology to help make remote facility management cost-effective, while maintaining or even improving the customer experience.

Learn more about connected products and Canopy — read our guide.