Maintenance

I have a beef with our reseller. Their support is appalling and for
the most part we resolve problems ourselves or speak to other users
and get resolutions. In fact we often have the reseller call us for
work arounds or tips!

However they still continue to charge us a s**t load of cash every
year for the privelage of getting updates.

Has anyone gone their own way and just got a relationship with SW for
updates only?

Thoughts?

 

I used to work for a reseller. As far as I know, there is no way to
get support directly through SolidWorks. I am surprised to hear that
your VAR is so bad. The company I used to work for really took pride
in making sure that they provided the best support they could. All of
the tech guys were CSWPs. Even the other resellers that we competed
with were pretty good. You can request to be reassigend to a new
VAR. You have to write a letter to SolidWorks requesting the change.
SolidWorks really discourages it and they will try to work with you to
resolve the problems first, but it is possible.

 

Clearly not going to name names as that would be unfair. What we tend
to find is the VAR is rarely (if ever) able to give us a quick
response to any problem. The usual excuse is that the support staff
are off-site or unavailable. When you are working in a commercial
environment with pressures on finishing designs you can't wait for 2
to 3 days for someone to come back to you. A quick hop on the Google
group or trying out a few things normally resolves the issue in less
time - and for £1300 a year less per seat.

Therefore I am paying a hell of a lot of money purely for updates. I
imagine that this is the same for a lot of companies and users or else
the Google group would not be such an excellent resource.

 

I have rarely seen resellers that can give timely answers. For one
thing, many think that giving a workaround constitutes a "solution".
Resellers are not privy to the code behind SolidWorks. You cannot
therefore expect them to actually fix anything that is broken. They
are frequently not even privy or willing to use the resources users
have at their disposal. Even more rarely will they take the time to
fill in the blanks from what you tell them. When a reseller has to
refer to SolidWorks for assistance, that is the kiss of death to
getting a timely answer because SW will put it in their queue and then
resolve it in some obscure way that has nothing to do with actually
fixing your problem.

So my solution to all this is to simply not use the reseller except in
dire emergencies and then with the caveat that if they don't have a
fix for it in 8 hours it isn't going to be fixed. I run SW a year or
more behind the current release when all the service packs that are
going to be issued have been issued and all the major issues have been
found.

Having these lowered expectations can really go a long way to helping
both getting your job done and your sanity.

TOP

P.S. SW only has one factor in their favor for obtaining a renewal and
that is the fact that you may have to buy more seats or work with
someone who has. Other than that there is very likely no compelling
reason to pay maintainence.

 

chris whos you reseller if your UK based i can probably tell you if
they are good or not or just having a bad day
ps send me a mail dont air the laundry on here

 

What's not fair about naming names? If these guys really are that bad,
inform us all. Word might get back to the head of the company and things
might change due to bad publicity. Or, someone at Solidworks may hear about
it, but I really doubt they give a rat's a$$.


Clearly not going to name names as that would be unfair. What we tend
to find is the VAR is rarely (if ever) able to give us a quick
response to any problem. The usual excuse is that the support staff
are off-site or unavailable. When you are working in a commercial
environment with pressures on finishing designs you can't wait for 2
to 3 days for someone to come back to you. A quick hop on the Google
group or trying out a few things normally resolves the issue in less
time - and for £1300 a year less per seat.

Therefore I am paying a hell of a lot of money purely for updates. I
imagine that this is the same for a lot of companies and users or else
the Google group would not be such an excellent resource.

 

It's not "airing dirty laundry" if he has a legitimate complaint about poor
service. Let us all know who the culprits are so we can take our pounds
(dollars) elsewhere. Things will never change for the better if we don't
"vote with the pocketbook".

 

I agree, in a way.

If a reseller sucks, name names.

OTOH, this is the internet; playground of shills and cranks.
Unsubstantiated claims and accusations everywhere.

That said; VAR based support systems are antiquated.
Factory support is the only way to level the playing field.
The 'added' value in VAR should be over and above that.

 

Realistically, I don't call my reseller very often, as prior calls
have nearly always resulted in no answer. Sometimes the tech. support
people readily admitted to me that they were new to the job and
"didn't know" anything about the particular issue I called about
because they had only been on the job less than a month.

I personnally think SolidWorks needs to maintain a database available
to all users that allows users to search just like in Google, so we
can track down solutions which have already been found (or not) in
earlier Tech.Support work.

Having the same question answered by each VAR all across the world
multiple times with multiple calls to SWks, etc is a 20th Century
solution.

Hey SolidWorks. SQL database, Google front end, blade servers, people
permanently hired/promoted to maintain the problems and answers DB and
the structure to make it an ongoing support solution.

Bo

 

In addition to the above, if we are not at the most up to date service
pack for a given version, our VAR will not help. They simply tell us
to go to the newer SP and maybe that will fix the problem. Since
upgrading to a newer SP is a corporate decision (and they are rightly
reluctant to do so without testing), the VAR is useless.

 

The situation with my var was pretty bad so I changed... perhaps this
story will be helpful for some of you.

When I purchased SW the sales guy gave me some false information about
the update pricing. When I went to update, of course they wouldn't
honor the prices that I very clearly asked about at the time of
purchase. I found out later that this perticular VAR goes through
salesmen every 6 months or so and of course the origional guy was long
gone. Actually, the support guys don't seem to stay around very long
either. This is probably a good question to ask the sales guy and the
technical support guys when first looking for a VAR, "how long have
you worked for XYZ?" If they say more then 2 years or more there are
probably good reasons for this.

I ended up presented my compalint a couple levels of management to SW
and they basically did nothing. If the truth would be known SW could
have just made it right and we would have all been better off because
they spend a lot of time on this issue. My personal opinion is that
the SW Technical group really does try to do a good job but the SW
Marketing group STINKS. They have some of the stupdest policies.

Towards the end of trying to work with the VAR, I wrote another long
explanation and the response that I got from the VAR was that I had
gotten a free year of support, basically implying that I was stealing
support and they basically implied that I didn't deserve the origional
quoted pricing anyway. Before SW, I had/have Inventor and I just
didn't want to purchase another CAD package with the same problems....
Hey, at least they should be different problems for the money
spent... So, for about 9 months I asked the sales guy lots of
questions. Mostly when I had a problem with Inventor, I wanted to see
if SW had the same issues. I considered these questions to be pre-
sales questions but apparently the VAR considerd these questions Free
Technical Support, (for a year at that). But there wern't that many
calls, and I was working with a salesman.

Another thing that I noticed about the VAR was that they always had a
lot of people shifting around. In the beginning of my time they had a
fellow that provided some of the best technical support that I have
EVER received. However, there was some type of problem with his
avability, (of course this guys avability to the users was fantastic)
but they fired him and replaced him with a couple of guys that wern't
worth the effort to dial the phone.

Ultimately, SW's solution was for me to going through the process of
changing VAR's and so far have been very happy with the new VAR:
Hawkridge Systems, (if you are curious). They have worked with me a
little on the price and while the tech support has not been perfect,
most of the time it has been timely and effective.

Hope this helps so of you.

Edt

 

For all that people like to knock Microsoft, their on-line knowledge base is
pretty good, and is readily searchable using google, if you're too lazy to
go directly to their site.

I don't see why SWX couldn't do the same.

John H

 

John, I think it would benefit SolidWorks, the VARs, & primarily the
end users, if all problem solving issues were on line.

Is that not why we use computers?

Bo

 

My 2 cents:

My reseller is pretty excellent, they have their own 'issue' id
system which they use to follow-up via email, phone call etc. But I
make use of them in a particular way - mainly getting spr's assigned
to bugs. Their tech-support people are adequate knowledge wise, but I
consider my maintenance money is simply to keep up to date with the
software, the 'tech support' is like bling. The money is for the
updates.

 

uh, SolidWorks did make a searchable knowledge base, and put it online.

The customer portal has been available for months.