moran@warbucks.ai.sri.com (Doug Moran) (02/09/89)
>Recap: Steve Harris (etnibsd!vsh@uunet.uu.net) asked about how reliably >other people were receiving STB's (Software Technical Bulletins), >noting that he was missing 5 from that year, and that he couldn't get >replacements. There are two issues here that I would like to address: who should receive STB's and "lost" shipments. I have been round and round with Sun on these issues, and have resigned myself to the current situation. However, (1) some of the details below might be helpful to people new to these problems, and (2) if other customers have similar problems, now is supposedly a good time to highlight the problems to Sun. Many of these problems outlined are at least partly the result of Sun's MIS system -- a system that is currently badly overtaxed and which is supposedly in the process of being replaced. Some of the problems may automatically get fixed, but other may propagate from the old system to the new one unless Sun realizes that the old way needs to be changed. Multiple copies of STB: My company has site-wide software and hardware maintenance agreements. There are multiple groups within the company, and each major group has a contact listed on the contract. Sun sends only one copy of the STB per SW maintenance contract and sends it to the "primary" contact, which in our case is the buyer in the Purchasing Dept. He then passes that copy on to one of the groups, selected on a rotating basis. Photocopying the STB (assuming we could get permission from Sun) is not a viable option because of internal bureaucratic problems. I have dealt with three successive Sun sales reps on this issue over the past 3 years. The first two told me that nothing could be done at that time -- the computer program that generated the labels could not handle more than one addressee per contract -- but that the situation might resolve itself in the "next 6-12 months". The current sales rep did a little better -- the person she talked to acknowledged that it was a problem and needed to be fixed and projected that the impediment would be removed in "60-90 days". That was last June. I think that the sales reps did a good job in pursuing this issue -- my conclusion is nothing has happened because Sun doesn't see this as an important issue to most customers, and thus it doesn't warrant the resources that would be required to fix it. A major portion of the content of the STB is a list of reported bugs, which I would find quite useful (even with the publication delays). However, as someone else has pointed out in this list, it would be much easier to search this list if we had an online copy, rather than hardcopy. I raised this issue with Sun and was told that the STB would be available only in hardcopy, and that for online searches, one should use the online bugs database. Unfortunately, that database is not indexed in a useful way and I know of no one who actually uses it -- I know of a number of people, including myself, who tried to use it once and said never again. Which brings up the issue of what are the benefits of being a "point of contact" on a maintenance contract. The company I work for has multiple groups and Sun charges us $50/month for having additional (>3) people listed as contacts. However, there is no apparent benefit associated with this, except for being authorized to contact the "Hotline". Since our contacts are all long-term, highly experienced users of Suns and UNIX, our use of the Hotline is largely to report bugs and to see if there are fixes available. Since I don't regard a vendor listening to customer reports of defects in its product as providing an extra service to that customer, being "authorized" has no real benefit for such users (unless one argues that, like a tree failing in a forest with no one to hear it, a bug is not a bug until reported by someone with a maintenance contract :-)). If Sun is going to charge for additional contacts, the very least they could do is send those people their own copies of the STB. Note: As part of this last go-round, I was told that there would be an as-yet-undetermined charge for any additional copies. Lost Shipments: >Recap: Mr Harris' message stated that Sun claimed that their records >show that Sun had sent him the issues that he never received. Based on my experience, it is quite possible that either: (1) Sun didn't ship it but the MIS system said that it did, or (2) Sun shipped it with an inadequate or incorrect address and it went astray. We have had repeated problems with Sun's shipping of small mass-produced items (e.g., software distribution tapes purchased separately) and especially things sent under a maintenance contract. I am giving some details of what I have learned so that others will not expend inordinate amounts of effort convincing themselves that the problem is not theirs but Sun's (but at the same time, do not automatically assume that the problem is with Sun, check around first). Some items have been shipped to us without the name of any person or a purchase order (PO) number. On other shipments, the PO number is on there, but not identified as such, so our receiving clerks must go through the various strings of digits on the label, looking for one that is of the right length and in the range of active POs. Failing that, they simply guess which group to send it to. Needless to say, we have a number of misdelivered shipments. To cope with this, we established a mailing list of facility managers in the various groups so that a manager receiving a package that isn't his can broadcast a query and thereby find who it does belong to. My suspicion is that the problem is often in Sun's administrative software, and not in the entry of the order at my company or at the sales office because I have seen the problem occur on part of a purchase where the other parts had no problem or on one shipment of a maintenance contract where a previous or subsequent shipment was just fine. As recently as a year ago, I know that Sun was still having problems with some of their databases, and believe that the problem was that the shipping address was an attribute of a company rather than of a person within the company. At that time we had swap-by-mail hardware support (what Sun now calls "customer assisted return service"). When I would call in, the mailing address they had on file for me was invariably wrong. Since it would always be the address of one of the other contacts in the company, but not always the same one, I suspect that the address of the last person to receive a shipment became the address for the whole company (we quickly learned to check what address Sun would be using for each shipment). This inability to distinguish individuals within an organization may not be a problem for a company with a single campus, but it is a potentially significant problem when a company has groups scattered around the country. >>If a shipment goes astray, check not only with other groups within your company but also with your Purchasing Dept and with whomever pays the invoices. I know of multiple occurrences where the address of one of these people has been used instead of the person listed on the PO as "deliver to". This problem may well go away when and if the new MIS system is installed -- the problems are characteristic of (1) inexperienced and overworked programmers and (2) overloaded systems which don't permit adequate debugging runs and cause the notion of "close enough" to recede further and further from what is intended. We have also had a number of occurrences of shipments that Sun claims to have shipped that we are reasonably certain did not arrive -- some of these shipments were big enough (e.g. 8+ sets of manuals, two boxes per set) that they should have been remembered by the Receiving Dept (which didn't) and big enough that they would not be easily overlooked if misdelivered within the company (and we checked with all likely recipients). A possible explanation is that an item is recorded as shipped when its mailing label is printed and there are inadequate procedures for reconciling differences between what was scheduled to ship and what actually shipped (e.g., labels "lost" when the printer jams or runs out of forms, labels destroyed and misplaced in the shipping area, ...). Reconciling these differences is non-trivial and my understanding is that a fair number of companies deal with this problem by letting the customers catch the errors (the reasonable ones send replacements without hassling the customer). Note: this is typically a problem with mass-produced items, such as manuals and release tapes, where labels are being slapped on boxes. It is rarely a problem with individualized/configurable items, such as workstations, where the shipping labels must be matched to the boxes. >>From the number of instances of this problem I have heard of, I strongly suspect that this is not a rare occurrence. However, it has taken us significant time and effort to convince Sun that certain shipments did not arrive. It may be that not enough other customers are aggressively pursuing their lost shipments or that the reports of these problems are not getting back to the MIS people, so they are unaware of it. Shipments under maintenance contracts: An ongoing problem is that all shipments under the software maintenance contract go to a single point of contact, who must then redistribute them to the various groups covered by our site-wide contract. This problem is compounded by two factors. First, the tapes and manuals for a new release rarely arrive as a single shipment -- typically they arrive over a period of weeks/months. Second, a number of the updates have arrived without a mnemonic label, just a item code and part number (which, being new, appear in none of the literature we have), requiring the primary contact to open the boxes to determine what they contain and thus who should receive them. These are individually minor inconveniences, but cumulatively they significantly increase the effort required to get all the packages to the designated groups. We would like Sun to annotate the mailing label on each box in a shipment to be "attention of" a designated contact. Since each line item in a maintenance contract corresponds to a separate box, one would think that this would be easy to implement. We have suggested this to Sun, but have been told that it is beyond the capabilities of the software currently handling maintenance contracts. -- Doug Moran (with usual disclaimers)
Kemp@dockmaster.arpa (02/14/89)
Thanks to Doug Moran (v7n146) for the very illuminating discussion of software maintenance problems. Like his organization, we have a single maintenance contract with Sun, however the contract has multiple "Exhibits" (work groups). Each Exhibit has a list of machine serial numbers and a primary and an alternate point of contact, and each should in theory get a copy of STBs and upgrade tapes. This sounds like the proper way to get around the "1 contract, 1 STB" situation, but the bugs still aren't worked out yet. I am the alternate POC for a group of 10 machines; our maintenance contract began on October 1; and I still don't have a single STB or the 4.0.1 tapes. (We borrowed a copy of the tape from another group). The local Sun critters are very earnest and are trying to help, and the latest word is that the local sales office will get the stuff and deliver it to us personally, but it hasn't happened yet. Sigh. Kemp@DOCKMASTER.ARPA (Dave Kemp)