You have just invested in a new vehicle, the one of your dreams, and you take it on a trip across Canada. You only put gas in it and drive sightseeing and following your nose. Filters and oil changes are ignored. The car breaks down in the middle of that long stretch of road between Manitoba and Alberta. It takes two days to get you up and running and the bill is more than a year’s worth of oil changes and regular maintenance. Just like the family vehicle, your business computer systems require regular maintenance to ensure optimum system performance and uptime to prevent productivity losses. What really happens during system failure?
The user is unable to do their job using the productivity tools you have provided Potentially this may affect two or more employees if their activities are linked The system failure may be enterprise wide, causing everyone down time The failure may happen at the “worst possible time”. Closing date for an RFP submission, payroll, month-end or year-end there may be total data loss
The people affected must contact the support person and explain the issue. Hopefully, the service provider is immediately available and they must only wait while the technician travels to the site. Once on site, the technician must diagnose the problem and implement the repair. Will parts be needed? Will they need to be ordered? Will a temporary loaner be required? Will software need to be reloaded? Will software support need to be contacted?
All of these will add to the time to resolve the problem. During this time one or more of your staff will be unable to do their job using the tools provided. How much money is lost in employee downtime, lost sales opportunities, damaged client information, investments to rebuild data, and potentially no available back-up? Emergency callout rates for the service provider may be in effect. Express shipping costs, Software support costs, and data recovery costs may apply. You are looking at an expensive solution! What is the cost of a pro-active repair?
