“We make a big deal of training here,” said Josh Bigelow, president of Great Dane Heating & Air Conditioning Inc. in Clinton Township, Mich. That statement summarizes how important training is at Great Dane, The NEWS’ 2012 Best Contractor to Work For in the North Central Region.

Working at The NEWS and living in Michigan, there are two things that you can count on like clockwork come January: the AHR Expo and the North American International Auto Show.

Is there more to celebrating and honoring our veterans than the retail sales that pop up this time of year?

As an industry, whether an HVACR contracting firm is doing service and maintenance or installations, employees need to go to the jobsite to perform their work. Because installers and service technicians have to be on the road for their job, some going to several jobsites in a day, they need vehicles to drive.

Whether it’s getting the system ready to use for the very first time or figuring out what’s wrong before fixing it, these detectors, monitors, sensors, and tools make it possible to get the job done.

From giving turn-by-turn directions for a technician to drive from one jobsite to the next, to figuring out who is closest to a particular jobsite with the right equipment to make a service call, a GPS can provide contracting companies with more information that they can utilize to run their operation more efficiently.

Can you believe it? Not only are the Detroit Tigers in the playoffs, which has happened a few times before, but the Detroit Lions, the LIONS of all teams, are playing unbelievably well.

Today, we have an incalculable number of tools to do at least as many different tasks. Examples include tools for preparing our food, to making wooden furniture, to installing and fixing HVACR systems. It is this last type of tool that we honor with the 2011 Dealer Design Awards in the Tools category.

Products that test and monitor make working with and on units so much easier for contractors and technicians, including when it comes to troubleshooting. The winners of the Testing & Monitoring Products category of the 2011 Dealer Design Awards share these traits.