Mr. Allard: The company was founded in 1999 through the integration of our holding company, WPI Group, and one of our divisions, Micro Processor Systems, Inc. (MPSI). MPSI has been in business for 20 years, manufacturing hand-held tools and developing diagnostic software for real-time engine diagnostics, performed in service bays on heavy-duty vehicles. WPI, founded in 1988, acquired a number of industrial technology companies through 1998. We sold those all off in the last year and a half to focus our entire energy behind NEXIQ Technologies, our new name. This is the MPSI opportunity, which we're now undertaking. We were able to also pay off a significant amount of our debt. The company had taken on a lot of debt, gotten themselves in some trouble. And the new management team came in and we basically divested ourselves of all those niche pieces, and reorganized the business behind this new play.
TWST: What is the product?
Mr. Allard: Our new service, e-Technician, is what we're leveraging off
of MPSI's core facilities-based products. Traditionally, we've sold
hand-held tools to maintenance shops. They include scan tools, parallel
and serial port data modules and gas analyzers. They read the
information that comes off the data bus on heavy-duty trucks. So if a
heavy-duty truck needs to be serviced, it goes to one of hundreds or
thousands of maintenance shops around the country. There service
technicians use one of our tools to scan the information on the truck,
determine how it's been running and operating and then diagnose what
needs to be fixed. As I said, we've written software and manufactured
the tools to sell to those facilities for the past 20 years. Our
diagnostics tools are found in every major truck service bay in the
country. What we're doing now is we're using today's wireless technology
to be able to provide a real-time engine diagnostics service by putting
a unit on board the trucks. Now, in addition to selling to the
facilities, we're putting a unit on board each of the trucks. We're
selling the same set of services plus. This way, we're getting a monthly
recurring revenue stream directly from the vehicles through the fleet
operators and vehicle leasing firms. For the customers, they have real-
time engine diagnostics and know the pre-arrival diagnostics for a
specific truck. They know if certain parameters are being checked off,
they can get billing information by odometer reading, they can look at
areas for fuel tax savings, do pre-arrival diagnostics and alerts, make
parameter changes, all those kinds of things, on a real-time basis.
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