16.5 Vendor and Carrier Services

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From an administrative perspective, the easiest way to obtain service and support is to let the equipment vendor or carrier handle it. There are some key advantages in doing so, which may override cost concerns.

The vendor can bring more resources to bear on a problem with its specialized staff of hardware and software engineers, who are experienced in solving a broad range of problems for an entire installed base of customers—domestic and international. The largest equipment vendors, and some maintenance firms, are able to expedite problem-solving with dial-up links from a NOC to remote customer sites. Using advanced predictive maintenance tools, customer systems can be monitored and analyzed to identify potential problems before they affect system performance. When something goes wrong with a system that is being monitored, the vendor tries to solve the problem remotely, such as reinitializing the inoperable system. Failing that, technicians are dispatched to the scene immediately with the right spare parts and information to correct the problem. Such an arrangement is roughly equivalent to having the vendor on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This capability is especially important to large companies with international locations.

Most vendors offer a range of basic service agreements. Forty-hour-a-week service-is sufficient for most companies, with a time-and-materials provision for emergency service after normal business hours. There are also standard agreements for 24-hour, 7-day-a-week service. The price differential between the two plans may be quite high, as much as 30%. Most firms offering maintenance and support services will customize a service agreement to include performance guarantees, specifying such things as response time to trouble calls and penalties for given levels of downtime. Typically, penalties take the form of credits on future maintenance service billing.

Depending on the scope and complexity of service needs, it might be advantageous to retain a consultant to perform a needs assessment of maintenance and support requirements and, based on the findings, issue an RFP to ensure that the most qualified firm is selected. Another technique entails paying service firms a fee to perform the needs analysis with the understanding that, in the process, they are competing for the contract.

There is another way to obtain the level of maintenance and support services economically, but this usually involves taking more responsibility for diagnosing problems before calling in the vendor or maintenance firm. Such services usually require the customer to implement a help desk, which is staffed by personnel who can determine the cause of routine problems and offer solutions that will get the user up and running quickly. This minimizes unnecessary equipment downtime, saves the vendor unnecessary interactions with the customer, and eliminates unnecessary maintenance charges. The help desk can reduce overall maintenance charges by as much as 25%. In standardizing reporting procedures and structuring maintenance charges uniformly over its entire customer base, the vendor or maintenance service provider can reduce its own costs and pass the resulting savings onto its customers.

Another way that maintenance and support services can be obtained economically is through a master contract. Instead of negotiating each service option and getting the paperwork approved at several points within the vendor organization, the user signs one master contract. Each option is selected off the master list and initialed. This simplifies service administration, which benefits both the vendor and user.

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