Ready for a game-changer? The latest car wash technology means owners and managers no longer have to be onsite at their wash to monitor and manage operations.
The NCS Lens System enables your carwash equipment to send metrics, insights and alerts in real time to your phone. Now you can monitor carwash performance from anywhere, to guarantee peak efficiency and customer satisfaction. You also get complete and accurate data-driven reporting you never could have captured before.
The NCS Lens App gives you powerful remote oversight. You control your business instead of your business controlling you.
Think of it as operations in your pocket. The high-tech way to stay on top of your ops. Or the world’s greatest tool to avoid one-star reviews.
What Is NCS Lens?
The NCS Lens App is a cloud-based software solution that connects your smartphone, tablet or computer to your car wash equipment and systems.
NCS Lens Enabled (LE) car wash systems employ sensors and software to monitor and adjust equipment automatically and remotely – no onsite visit required. Equipment is connected wirelessly to the Lens Hub in your backroom. The hub, in turn, communicates in real time with the Lens app on your device. It’s a revolutionary step forward in car wash management.
Cloud-based carwash management may sound futuristic or far-fetched. Some will immediately recognize the benefits and embrace it. Others may think it’s too complicated or expensive. But it’s not that different from your home doorbell cam or thermostat app. It’s not prohibitively priced for the benefits, and it’s not hard to use. It’s the same concept, on a more industrial scale.
Speaking of industrial scale, many manufacturers use automated processes and remote monitoring (known as Industry 4.0) to produce a wide variety of goods. Which is a good analogy since your carwash can be thought of as a mini manufacturing plant. The raw goods are a dirty car and the finished product is a clean, dry, shiny one. Every stage of the carwashing process – from presoak and foam soap to rinse, seal, polish and dry to brush motors, water systems, pumps, chemical levels, vacuum filters and pressure and more – can be monitored, optimized and controlled remotely in real time. Borrowing from the Industry 4.0 framework, this capability is known as Carwash 4.0.™
The Power to “Wash Connected“
“It’s all about connections,” says Josh Barnes, senior product manager of NCS. “With the NCS Lens System, you’re connected to your car wash for greater control, equipment alerts, efficiency, cost savings and ROI. You’re connected to your customers through data about their preferences and purchase behavior. And your customers are connected to a more consistent car wash.”
The benefits are clear and dramatic:
- Maximized Uptime
- Operational Excellence
- Superior Customer Experience
- Efficiency
- Cost Savings
Oversight When You’re Offsite
NCS Lens gives you real-time carwash operations data on your phone or tablet – even if you’re half the country away at a conference or family reunion. While you’re away, your carwash can “phone a friend” – sending metrics, insights and alerts in real time to your phone, so you can stay aware of what’s happening. The result is a fewer unexpected hiccups and faster response to problems.
With Connected Chemistry, for example, you can:
- Monitor and control dosing from anywhere, anytime
- Optimize dosing in fine increments to dial in car wash performance while cutting waste and excess chemistry costs by up to 27%
- Reduce downtime with real-time alerts to reservoir levels
With Connected Water, you can:
- Monitor fresh water bypass status
- Confirm reclaim and RO status in real time
- Get maintenance reminders to stay ahead of issues
With Connected Vacuums, you can guarantee a good customer experience by:
- Tracking system and filter pressure
- Get alerts to clean or replace filters
- Monitor motor and bearing health
- Fix problems before customers experience poor performance
A Quantum Leap in Car Wash Management
If you own or supervise a commercial car wash service, you know how critical it is to keep all systems running well. But it’s tough to be everywhere at once. And once you have multiple locations, chances are, things are happening in your business that you don’t know about.
With NCS Lens, you not only have multi-site visibility, you have control of who has access to what. You can set permissions for managers. You have extra visibility to what your staff is doing.
Even with dozens of years of experience, your personal expertise only goes so far. The reporting that actual data can provide, vs. educated guesswork, is critical in knowing how your business is running and where costs are coming from.
If you own or are running a large chain – perhaps even hundreds of sites – what’s the best way to know how sites compare, and what the numbers are from each location? Comparing actual data across sites – with powerful analytics – helps you know which sites are performing and gives you insights into why. You have better visibility as to where your costs are and where you can improve in delivering the best possible customer experience.
Key Benefits of the NCS Lens App
In hand, on your phone or tablet, the NCS Lens App is intuitive and easy to use. Critical metrics from each connected system are right at your fingertips.
Efficiency and Cost Savings
Consistent monitoring of your car wash operation through the NCS Lens App improves car wash efficiency and saves you money in critical areas. You can optimize:
- Chemical usage: Use the app to manage AccuDose technology to home in on optimal dosing – balancing wash quality with product usage
- Water consumption: Through the app’s intelligent monitoring of water systems, you can gauge and limit the water the system uses per wash
- Energy consumption: Know which systems draw more power and could be replaced by never, more efficient equipment
Less Downtime
We know about the “D” word. Downtime is dreaded. It’s damaging. It drains profit. The sooner you can know about a problem with chemistry dosing or a vacuum filter, or your water supply, the faster you or someone in your business can get it fixed. You don’t want customers to be the first to know something’s wrong. And you don’t want downtime to make them go elsewhere.
This is one of the great benefits of Carwash 4.0™ thinking. Sensors monitoring and interpreting equipment signals in real time, all the time, is superior to human oversight. Isn’t it better for your peace of mind, to know the Lens App will ping you when something happens?
Best of all, Condition Based Maintenance means subtle aspects of equipment function, like heat, noise, revolutions and power use can be used to predict failure before it happens. That means you schedule maintenance ahead of time, instead of letting your wash sit idle unexpectedly.
Operational Excellence and Quality
Operational excellence and quality assurance go hand in hand. Neither one is a one-time event. It’s a continuous process requiring planning, implementation, monitoring and improvement.
The data and insights that come from Lens oversight help you:
- Define quality objectives and standards: Identifying the expectations and requirements of customers, stakeholders and industry norms and regulations will give you a clear vision of what quality means and how to measure it
- Implement quality control procedures: Have a set of guidelines specifying how your team will perform each car wash operation task. Using the Lens checklist feature can verify employees know about tasks and complete them in a timely way
- Monitor and measure quality performance: You can constantly evaluate quality performance and identify areas for improvement
- Improve quality continuously: The ability to make small and large data-driven tweaks continuously improves operations
Embrace the Future of Car Wash Management Today
NCS is proud to be in the forefront of developing Carwash 4.0™ solutions like NCS Lens. These systems and benefits are available now, with new features and capabilities arriving all the time. Early adopters of this revolutionary technology can get ahead of the car wash industry to gain a more significant share of projected revenue growth over the coming years.
Learn more about how the NCS Lens App is leading the industry, and embrace the future of car wash management.
