Re: [foxboro] Service Agreement

Ricky,
     I understand your concerns.  If you are basically self supporting
and tackle most of the day-to-day issues with your own people in-house
as we do, it is difficult to recognize the value of a costly agreement.
One thing that is important to us is online access to all of the Foxboro
IA documentation, Quick Fixes, software updates, Helpful Hints.  We use
the online documentation daily to perform our jobs and I recognize that
there is a cost associated to keeping it up to date.  It is vital to our
ability to do our jobs and overall I think Foxboro does a good job in
serving it via their website.  Organizing that much data and presenting
it in a browser is a challenging task.
        When things don't work as expected or we find that there is a
bug in the software, (heaven forbid), we want quick resolution to the
problem.  If Foxboro has already recognized and fixed it before we
discover it, the process isn't too bad but if they know about it and are
working on it they don't really let on that it is a problem until they
finish the fix.  Gotta say that pisses me off because we wind up
spending a lot of our time trying to document and qualify the problem to
write a CAR and they already know that it is a problem. =20
        Fixes to the problems that they sold to us in software
applications often take a long time and I don't think our service
contract price should go up because they didn't do their homework before
releasing a product or application.  This is one of the primary reasons
that the TAC organization is often stretched so thin.  The users coupled
with TAC are essentially responsible for debugging the faulty software
that development releases.  Feedback goes from TAC back to development
and they work on it when they get time.  This is my primary beef with
Foxboro.  The service contract prices are what they are in order to pay
the service support overhead costs.  The need would be greatly reduced
if the products and applications were developed and tested more
thoroughly before release.  Overall, I have been pretty satisfied with
the hardware quality and reliability.  It is mostly bugs in the software
applications that are eating everyone's lunch.
        At one point in my career we decided that the service contract
price was not valuable to us so we discontinued it for two years.
Undoubtedly it caused a riff in our relationship with Foxboro but in the
end we received pricing that we felt was fair for both sides.  We have
recently included some contingency money in our contract that can be
used for training or special needs such as help installing or setting up
new products or applications.  We have brought knowledgeable Foxboro
resources to our site using this contingency money and I think it has
been worthwhile.

Hope this is helpful.
Cheers,
Tom VandeWater

-----Original Message-----
From: foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Ricky.Cash@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 6:53 AM
To: foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [foxboro] Service Agreement

Good Morning,
We are in process of negotiating our new Service Agreement with
Invensys,=20
and as we do every 3 years, we are struggling with understanding the
value=20
we receive from this agreement.  How many of the Users on the list have
an=20
agreement with Invensys and do you feel it is a good value? For those
that=20
do not have an agreement, have you had any issues that you feel could
have=20
been handled better with a service agreement?  We have had an agreement=20
since 1993, but have always struggled that the money may be better spent

in a different direction.
Thanks in advance for your ideas,

Ricky Cash
Process Control Engineer
Greif Inc.
Amherst VA

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