Award winner: a real-world CSI player

<< See all the 2011 International Business Award Winners

When Montreal engineer Robert Walsh founded  Forensic Technology in the early 1990s, he had no knowledge of guns and no idea his company’s invention—the Integrated Ballistic Identification System (IBIS)—would become so famous that it would be featured on all three CSI TV shows and Jeopardy. Now installed in some 60 countries, including more than 200 locations in the U.S., IBIS is a sophisticated crime-fighting tool that allows lab technicians to automate, digitalize and integrate microscopic information from spent bullets and casings and, with the click of a mouse, “talk” to other IBIS hubs. Put simply, it is the fingerprinting of guns.

Forensic Technology was honoured at the 2011 HSBC International Business Awards in May when it won the award for excellence among large Canadian companies.

Forensic Technology General Manager, René Bélanger

How the company started, “is kind of an interesting story,” says vice-president and general manager René Bélanger. “Our previous company, Walsh Automation, had a small department that was doing what we called ‘machine vision’ using a camera and a computer to analyze various images for inspection purposes. A former RCMP firearms examiner came to us defining the challenge he had because of the increased volume of bullets he had to look at under a microscope. We decided to try to automate his work.”

Once its new technology was in place, going global was an obvious step, especially since gun crime was exploding elsewhere. “The U.S. was a natural,” Walsh says. Following its first federal contract in Washington in 1994, Forensic Technology has continued to work on upgrades of its IBIS product (soon to be available in 3D) while hiring a sales force that currently numbers 16 at home in Canada and 40 in such places as Spain, Portugal, Turkey and Latin America.

Such expansion was not without its challenges. “When you go abroad,” Bélanger says, “first you need to learn about the peculiarities of the different cultures. You aren’t going to do business in Canada and the U.S. in the same way as you are going to do it in the Philippines. And the important thing is to listen to the market. The product has been designed with a lot of feedback from the market and the more diverse the feed back was from different geographical regions, the stronger the product really became.”

The second thing Forensic Technology had to realize, Bélanger says, is that, “It is a very important investment for particularly small countries to install IBIS. They have to discover the technology and trust its ability to help them solve crimes.” At FT, he adds, “We have a saying that you need to balance people, processes and technology, and we try to make sure our customers are satisfied by aligning the proper number of people behind it and the good processes to help them solve their cases.”

There were lessons along the way. “When we started being successful,” Bélanger says, “we started to diversify our product offering thinking that, you know, we had been successful with one, we should be successful with more in a slightly different market, and that was a big error. We took a step back and refocused all our efforts on what we initially defined as our target market.”

If he has any advice for companies seeking to go abroad, Bélanger frames it this way. “You need to know where you are going and you need to strive for that particular segment of the market that ties with your product and keep going at it.” With an IBIS hub to boast about at Interpol in Lyon, France, Bélanger adds, “The world is still our target.”

<< See all the 2011 International Business Award Winners