PhilipW
Member
Just to put a sense of perspective on all of this....I must have flashed literally hundreds of CLX modules over the last 8 years....and never "bricked" a single one.
Any suggestions on how to do it better? The previous scheme was based only on the number of software licenses the end-user held, which penalised those who honestly purchased all the licenses they should have had, and those who had a relatively small installed base. TechConnect now takes account of the number of installed CPU's in the expectation that overall this number has a better correlation with the expected support level required.
Having done more than my bit of TechSupport over the years I can tell you that we got lame calls from people who haven't done the training course, read the manual or even done basic information gathering before calling. Some of these types chew up HOURS of phone time and leave you utterly burned off at the end. At the other end of the spectrum you can get calls from people with very advanced skills, who expect that you have at your fingertips the exact answer to a bug they have uncovered because they have pushed their system to the bleeding edge...or put together a combination of components and firmware revisions never qualified....or they really have uncovered a genuine bug.
And providing a comprehensive support system that can handle the enormous range of calls from these people, over the very large range of products Rockwell supports, with 24 hr global availability is not a simple task. It is quite a different story to supporting a very narrow range of products that are applied in a typically limited range of ways to a limited customer base....a handful of people can deliver good support quite easily, but that kind of system totally breaksdown when scaled up.
Rockwell went through a major support transition about 7-10 years ago. We moved from very personalised local scale support (which could be excellent or terrible) to the beginnings of the current global system. The teething pains were terrible, but the system nowdays delivers overall far better and consistent support than was ever possible before. The trouble is that everyone loves grizzling about the small handful of occasions something isn't handled quite right, but never bother telling the success stories. Here is one:
An SLC500 system with a 1747-SDN scanner with lots of 1734 Point IO modules. Over time we had upgraded the scanner firmware to utilised some new features, but we ran into some truly weird problems with 1734-OB2 modules dropping off the network and erratically re-covering if at all. Unfortunately opportunities to troubleshoot this system are very limited, so it took time to qualify the nature of the problem. When I finally had a clear picture of what was happening (along with Ken R's advice) I got a Case# into the system. Within a day I had a detailed confirmation of the cause of my problem (and turned out to be a VERY obscure bug, caused by a combination of firmware incompatibilty, power-up times and the exact layout of my modules), and Rockwell replaced every one of the 1734-OB2's with later version modules. This was VERY welcome.
And I only got that result because I worked the system constructively...I did my homework to exactly qualify the problem, made my case in detail, explained why it was important and took a positive attitude throughout. By complete contrast I recall loosing my bundle late one night with TechSupport over a completely different issue in RSLogix500. I got nowhere. An hour later I called back, made sure I got the same guy and apologised...and the guy in the meantime had sussed the problem and had the answer. And I might add he really appreciated being treated as a human being the second time round.
Any suggestions on how to do it better? The previous scheme was based only on the number of software licenses the end-user held, which penalised those who honestly purchased all the licenses they should have had, and those who had a relatively small installed base. TechConnect now takes account of the number of installed CPU's in the expectation that overall this number has a better correlation with the expected support level required.
Having done more than my bit of TechSupport over the years I can tell you that we got lame calls from people who haven't done the training course, read the manual or even done basic information gathering before calling. Some of these types chew up HOURS of phone time and leave you utterly burned off at the end. At the other end of the spectrum you can get calls from people with very advanced skills, who expect that you have at your fingertips the exact answer to a bug they have uncovered because they have pushed their system to the bleeding edge...or put together a combination of components and firmware revisions never qualified....or they really have uncovered a genuine bug.
And providing a comprehensive support system that can handle the enormous range of calls from these people, over the very large range of products Rockwell supports, with 24 hr global availability is not a simple task. It is quite a different story to supporting a very narrow range of products that are applied in a typically limited range of ways to a limited customer base....a handful of people can deliver good support quite easily, but that kind of system totally breaksdown when scaled up.
Rockwell went through a major support transition about 7-10 years ago. We moved from very personalised local scale support (which could be excellent or terrible) to the beginnings of the current global system. The teething pains were terrible, but the system nowdays delivers overall far better and consistent support than was ever possible before. The trouble is that everyone loves grizzling about the small handful of occasions something isn't handled quite right, but never bother telling the success stories. Here is one:
An SLC500 system with a 1747-SDN scanner with lots of 1734 Point IO modules. Over time we had upgraded the scanner firmware to utilised some new features, but we ran into some truly weird problems with 1734-OB2 modules dropping off the network and erratically re-covering if at all. Unfortunately opportunities to troubleshoot this system are very limited, so it took time to qualify the nature of the problem. When I finally had a clear picture of what was happening (along with Ken R's advice) I got a Case# into the system. Within a day I had a detailed confirmation of the cause of my problem (and turned out to be a VERY obscure bug, caused by a combination of firmware incompatibilty, power-up times and the exact layout of my modules), and Rockwell replaced every one of the 1734-OB2's with later version modules. This was VERY welcome.
And I only got that result because I worked the system constructively...I did my homework to exactly qualify the problem, made my case in detail, explained why it was important and took a positive attitude throughout. By complete contrast I recall loosing my bundle late one night with TechSupport over a completely different issue in RSLogix500. I got nowhere. An hour later I called back, made sure I got the same guy and apologised...and the guy in the meantime had sussed the problem and had the answer. And I might add he really appreciated being treated as a human being the second time round.
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). I never had a failure that was not recoverable. 
