 Welcome to this episode of Door Hardware Nerds. I'm your host, Mia Merrill. Today, I'm joined by Kevin Waring. Kevin, please introduce yourself. Yeah, thanks, Mia. Hi, everybody. Kevin Waring, I'm the Director of Business Development here for Northern at Rickson within Oslo Abloy. Been on the team for just over four years now and have spent over 15 years in the industry and happy to be here today to talk about some touchless products. Great, we're very happy that you're joining us today. So aside from the operators, can we talk about some of the other things around the door that Norton has to facilitate touchless? Well, so a couple of things that we've looked at, and we see some of the trends that are out there and what we've done. And it's really about how can we help reduce the touch points around the opening? And the first one is we look at wave to open switches. Traditionally, power operators were in a package and they included push buttons that are on the wall. And that migration, think back to, I know on the Norton side, think back to pre-COVID where maybe 10% to 12% of our solutions came through with wave to open switches to where we are today. Now about 90% of these solutions are coming through with wave to open switches. So a drastic change that we've seen just on that one little solution as well. But then it goes even as far into installation, right? So technicians or companies don't want to send necessarily two technicians out on the job site if they don't have to. So the platform that we chose to expand upon is a single technician installation platform. So all of our products will be migrating if they haven't migrated already to a single technician install. And what that means is we have a back plate that you would mount up to the wall. We have components that you would clip onto that to provide your complete solution. And no individual components greater than 20 pounds. So it's very easy for a single technician to go ahead and do that installation. Whereas oftentimes these solutions require you to have multiple people, two people, one holding the operator, one installing the operator to do. So that's just some of the benefits that we have. And then we can even take it one step further and we look at some of our new programming capabilities. No need to be up and down on a ladder to adjust potentiometers. You can do it from a smart device and connect to the wifi programmer that's built into our operator. Now you can control it and be very specific about the settings that you want. So while that has a good component for installation and a time savings for installation, it really has a good benefit to the end user too, because now they can program all of their doors to operate exactly the same within a facility. So just multiple ways that with little tweaks to our product development, we've been able to come out with solutions for the marketplace. Yeah, I was hoping you were gonna mention wifi. I know we have another video, another discussion with Jay Vikas all around wifi operators, but yeah, I mean, I think it is an important piece to this touchless puzzle. Yeah, for sure. All right, so do you think touchless is gonna continue to be a trend even after COVID-19 goes away? Well, I mean, the short answer is yes, for sure. I don't see it letting up anytime soon. I think that the stigma that COVID has put out there is that we are all concerned. We think about how many more times a day we wash our hands or we use sanitizer or I know in my car, I keep a bottle of sanitizer. I mean, you never know when you're gonna need something and it's the heightened awareness. And if you have the opportunity to go through a facility that has a motorized solution on it, you just naturally feel better about that. I don't see it letting up anytime soon. In fact, I see quite the opposite. There was a study done and we think of restroom germs and this study was done by the percentage of people that feel that restroom touchless facilities are really important. And we look at that and think about it. You go to the bathroom, the toilet flushes, the soap spits out, the sink turns on, the towels come out. And then you're left there looking at the door and say, well, now what? Do I touch the door handle? There's no football, there's no automatic operator. So I think that touchless solution really ties in. But the outcome of that was 91% of the people find that that's extremely important for use in restroom. So I mean, that's just one statistic there alone. So no, I don't see it going away anytime soon. And in fact, building codes have changed now requiring, as we move forward, all buildings that have a public entrance with an automatic operator installed on it. So definitely something to catapult us into the future. Yeah, I know COVID has been the buzz for the past 18 months. But we forget we have really bad cold. We have really bad flu seasons. And also there are many times you're walking through an opening with a handful of stuff. I know I do it coming into the office, which my key fob is very helpful getting into my own office. It's the convenience not only of having an armful, but it's also in a really bad flu season, not having to touch the door and then worry about touching my face or anything else, or touching my car door afterwards or anything like that. So yeah, I think it's. I think it ties over even not just incident, the institutional or the commercial space. I mean, think about the I know on my personal house, I put a lock that unlocks as I approach it. You know, my my cell phone is my smart device that unlocks the door as I come up to it and went as far as to put a push paddle onto my door. So I can just bump it with my arm and if my hands are full or if whatever the case might be, I can get in very easily. So I think it's going to continue in all aspects of our life. Yeah, yeah, great. All right, any final thoughts today? No, I just appreciate the time to have a quick chat. It's always good to catch up with you and I look forward to many more of these. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on with me today. There will be a link below for the Hands-Free Opening Solutions website where you can find lots of information about all the different solutions we talked about and it will give you the most up-to-date product offerings. It'll include our Safer to Open Continuum, which will show you our less touch to touch less offerings. If you're interested in any of the products we talked about, but you don't know who to reach out to, I've also included a link to your local DSS office. Please like this video and subscribe to our channel. Thanks for joining us. Thanks everybody.