Support Contracts RA GTS

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Thread Starter

Bryan Weir

My company has been offered a service contract, by Rockwell Automation Global Technical Services, to cover Rockwell/Allen-Bradley hardware at our
site. This guarantees 24 hour supply and service at a (very high!), price. Does anyone have experience enough of this to comment on its value?

Bryan Weir.
 
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Scott Jensen

Bryan,
The big question here would be how much does your downtime cost you? These folks at GTS have their hands on every resource imaginable. But beware, as Rockwell products improve, they'll tell ya you need this and that to keep things up to speed.
Why have you not chosen to have your in house people maintain the system? (This question is assuming that the system is fully developed and running.) Rockwell/AB products that I've seen have been so reliable that our in house electricians have been able to handle anything that has come up. You could buy all the software you would ever need, (and training), to maintain it yourself, for what you would pay GTS over the long run.

Scott Jensen
Boeing
[email protected]
 
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Anthony de la Rosa

In my company the only real support contracts we have are for the software itself. It's your usual run of packages, RSLogix5, RSLogix500, RSLinx, PanelBuilder32, Adaptascan, DNet manager etc. as for any other form of support I run to my local A-B dealer -- and they do a very good job. The thing that gets me about paid up support with A-B is that it doesnt get such things as replacement processors out of the door any faster.

anthony
 
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Robert Scott

Bryan,

We operate a similar system to support "All PES EQUIPMENT" on a site in Ayrshire, Scotland. This system has now been in operation for 4 years. We
original started on a Very High Call-Out Charge but found that this was not ideal, because some people were being called out 2 or 3 times during their cover period and others not at all.

We now have 12 people working on a rota basis all receiving a payment for covering the period and able to respond within 30 Mins. of a call. Each
person carries a pager & mobile phone. Each Person called out is guaranteed a minimum payment as well as receiving the cover payment.

At present our average annual call-out is approximately 2 per month.

We calculated the cover period payment as 1 call-out per week & each call-out is a guaranteed 5 Hours.

I hope this will assist you to gauge the value of this contract.
All the Best

Bert Scott

PS Honeywell charge 2500 Euros for a upto 1 Hour telephone call & 1000 Euros/Hour if a visit to site is required.
 
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R A Peterson

<<
My company has been offered a service contract, by Rockwell Automation Global Technical Services, to cover Rockwell/Allen-Bradley hardware at our
site. This guarantees 24 hour supply and service at a (very high!), price. Does anyone have experience enough of this to comment on its value? >>

If you have to ask, you are in serious danger.
 
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Anthony de la Rosa

and for some things like the actual hardware, you're better off having that already in your MRO anyway. Take last week for example. I hadn't planned on keeping a spare PLC 5/80E on the shelf until I found out that in the whole country there were only 5 units to be had and my local dealer, Turtle and Hughes had one of them.


anthony
 
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Bryan...

IMHO Scott Jensen nailed down the answer for you. The value of the contract offered to your organization by GTS has to be looked at in the full context of your particular situation. Look at the following questions...

1) You maintain no spare parts inventory and do not wish to...
2) The skill level of your in-house technical people is not up to this task and won't be any time soon...
3) You have no close by Systems Integrator you have partnered with...
4) Your process, due to physical reasons, must be under "control" at all times...
5) Your process, due to business reasons, must run 24/7...
6) The structure of the control system is fluid in nature and changes constantly...

If you answered yes to most of those questions then the service contract from GTS may be of great interest to you. Now, look at these questions.

1) We maintain spare parts inventory on all critical control components...
2) The skill level of our in-house technical people is more then up to the task...
3) We have an excellent SI down the road who does most of our work in this area...
4) No, we can safely shut down our process if required...
5) Your process, due to business reasons, must run 24/7...
6) The structure of the control system is stable and changes only very rarely...

In the case where all of the above questions were answered "yes", I would think that the contract from GTS was of limited value to your facility.

There is no "yes/no" answer here Bryan. Ask yourself the kind of questions above and then go from there.

Best Regards... Rick Kelly

Project Technician
Cheese Operations
Kraft Canada
(613) 537-8069 V
(613) 537-8057 F
[email protected]
 
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