I agree with most of the below post,
In my Electrical line of work I work on very specific industrial equipment
in a very narrow but large industry, and was a State service manager at my
very young age for a global company after doing 10 plus years on the tools,
Whilst Still on the tools and being the manager also I carried all my
technical knowledge inside my brain with me, Then comes the time where me
and the state General manager don't see eye to eye so I leave and return to
the tools with a ex business partner still in the same line of work.
Over the time people move on in the global company and the technical
knowledge retires and dies.
Now I'm in the position because the global monster doesn't know anything
about there old legacy equipment they ship the calls from the bunkey
retarded electricians who only have ever wired up lights and power points
onto me.
I spend many hours a day on the phone answering there questions and wasting
my time infront of my clients, I solve there problem over the phone after
hours of calls, then they go back to the global monster and order the parts
....... I make $0.00 dollars .
So I'm in the process of sorting a 1300 support number that diverts to a
second mobile hopefully charged at $6.00 bucks a minute to the client to try
and recoup some of my wasted time, Supporting legacy equipment does take
time and money either in tech support or old parts.
Unfortunately everyone wants something for nuthin, it costs some one, so why
should I loose the money and not the client ???
This has got to the point that also my time that I would usually spend
flying stink wings, and flying my Cirrus has ground to a halt as my club has
nodout noticed.
regards
<Flak vest on>
Ben
West Oz
----- Original Message -----
From: "DMcD" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>; "Discussion of issues relating to Soaring in
Australia." <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 10:14 AM
Subject: Re: [Aus-soaring] DG Flugzeugbau strategy
HA
It's an interesting little topic this and one which appears to have
raised some irrational feelings.
I don't have any firm answer to this problem, but I do know for sure
from personal experience that manufacturing companies cannot afford to
support "legacy" equipment for ever. At some point in time, the number
of machines out in the market will result in enough support calls to
swamp the service and tech support department.
At that stage, several options are available:
1. Put on more support people. These are obviously an increasing
financial drain on the company. The other problem with this is that
frequently, in any company larger than one or two people, those who
know the facts about the legacy products are now old, senior, retired
etc. and those charged with the responsibility of doing the support
can't get the facts without talking to these (more expensive) people.
Unless support is charged for, this course of action will kill the
company dead. You find many successful software companies are killed
by their own success unless they change their charging model.
2. Stop support for legacy products or sell the rights to service the
legacy products to a third party.
In many machinery related companies, this happens quite early…
possibly as short as 4 years. For example, spares on the Rotax 505 are
no longer handled by Rotax, but by some company in France with the
result that most people don't use the certified part for spares. Many
car companies seem to have a 12 year parts policy. I think Landrover
had 25 years until bought by Ford. This won't work too well for
gliders since the service life is at least 25 and possibly more than
50 years and will result in the customers getting very annoyed.
3. Charge for support.
a: Make sure you have got the credit card details of the customer and
then use some call centre in some hot country where the people who
answer the support calls have no idea about what they are talking
about and just frustrate and annoy the customers. Increasingly this
seems to be the business model of most companies… Telstra, Adobe,
Microsoft etc.
b: Use qualified people inside the factory who know what they are
talking about and charge a reasonable rate for their work on a per
minute or per part of an hour basis. Charge for every item of support
and add a figure to every spare part and support item to cover the
costs.
c: Charge an annual support fee, normally called a maintenance
contract which covers all the support items and give service and spare
part prices at a discount as an incentive.
d: Add a support cost into the price of each glider to cover service
for ever. There is a fairly well known attrition rate of gliders and
eventually there will be only a few left and the support costs can
theoretically be calculated. This is almost impossible to work since
it would increase the cost of the gliders to an unacceptable level.
All the above is complicated immensely by things like EASA who appear
to be increasing the costs of certification etc. by a huge amount…
something which could not have been foreseen. It is also complicated
by the fact that although DG bought the rights to the LS products,
they are being asked to support ancient gliders such as the LS1 and
LS4 which they had nothing to do with and probably know little about.
Have a look at the DG tech support fora to see the nature of these
questions.
My opinion, for what it's worth, is that a maintenance agreement sort
of thing is the only acceptable solution. It provides something for
both the customer and the manufacturer. The difficulty is setting a
price for this which gives value to both sides. Again, I think DG have
come up with a fairly reasonable rate.
An example of this is the spindle motor for the DG 400. The old
electric motor became unavailable and DG had to source a revised motor
and gearbox… AND get it certified which is quite a cost to the
company. The new motor will cost you heaps. But it is legal and it is
available. The alternative is to do nothing and force DG400 owners
into using either illegal solutions, individually certified mechanisms
or to not use their engines.
We have several expensive German CNC machines with Siemens software.
There is no maintenance contract offered, probably because the Siemens
software is so awful that you could not possibly offer to support it
in any contractually binding way! However, I would gladly pay a
maintenance contract on these machines for the peace of mind of
knowing that they will continue to work and earn their keep,
especially while the lease contract is current. (When I rang several
owners of these machines to get references, the best referral I got
was "Things could not get any worse". The most common comment was
"class action".)
Another good area of similarity is software. You know that most
software from folk like Adobe will stop working sooner or later
because of some change in system software… so you keep upgrading. Same
story with CAD software. Upgrades are a fact of business nowadays and
something which is costed in each year. What's the difference between
paying for support on your glider and paying upgrades on software?
As I said, there is no clear and easy answer, but free tech support
for life is not a commercially viable option and anyone who thinks so
is trying to sell you something (or is that the Princess Bride?)
D
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