[c-nsp] Maintenace management
Justin Shore
justin at justinshore.com
Tue May 20 14:53:28 EDT 2008
I've spent the last 6 months working on getting our contracts
straightened out and ready for renewal. I've run into a number of major
problems. First was the sheer number of contracts that we'd accumulated
over time. We bought some things through our sister company, a partner.
Some of the contracts were in their name. We bought all of our new
items direct from Cisco but they managed to be on about a dozen
different contracts even though they were all bought on the same damn
PO. As items were shipped Cisco, in its infinite wisdom, created a new
contract and put the items that just shipped on that contract instead of
putting everything on one big contract. We had numerous internal items
that were on assorted contracts and some that weren't covered at all.
Still more internal items were mixed up with the sister company and we
discovered that we'd been paying for the coverage on some of their
items. Even worse was that somehow some of the sister company's
customer SmartNets had somehow gotten associated with us. We also had
numerous ISP contracts. Some of the items had been bought 3rd-party or
off of eBay. 2 of them still had active contracts being paid by the
previous owner (thank you Wal-Mart!). We also had contracts on leased
CPE equipment that I didn't know about (I'm still hearing new items
fitting in this category every couple of months). To say that our
current arrangement was a "cluster" would be putting it lightly.
I spent the last 6 months trying to sort things out. First I had to
have an accurate list of what we had including model #s, serial #s,
device locations, device names, etc. Every detail that I'd need to
track that device effectively. Unfortunately this required a lot of
driving time to manually read serial #s off of chassis since you can't
pull the SN out of many Cisco devices. Who ever got the brilliant idea
to put the SN sticker for the PIX 515Es on the *side* of the chassis
where it's covered by the 2-post rack should be taken out and flogged
with 1700 series power cords with the power bricks attached. I worked
with a Cisco rep to create contracts for each of the device categories
we have (internal, ISP, CPE) and for each service level we wanted
(24x7x4 and 8x5xNBD). This is when we discovered that you can't have a
Sup's service level differ from the other linecars in a chassis (see
C-NSP archives). In the end the price was so high that we decided to
look at return-to-factory options (RTF). So we reworked the quotes
again with RTF prices and included lab hardware. I built spreadsheets
with both options to tally things up so I could present it to
management. Unfortunately my numbers aren't accurate because Cisco
insists on pre-dating some of our hardware back to the day that our
contracts expired (they expired far sooner than the year that we paid
for because of a problematic sales process. We didn't get the major
pieces until January but the 1yr contracts expired in November for
everything we bought last year. Nice).
So here we are 6 months later with a ton of hardware that isn't covered
and me trying to work the wrinkles out of the prices so I can present it
to management. In short, how do we manage our contracts? With blood,
sweat and tears; and brute force.
I blame a lot of the hassle on Cisco's SmartNet process. Apparently
there isn't a way to have a single general account that you can then
associate *items* with (according to what Cisco folks are telling me).
Instead items are associated with service contracts that can not be
modified after the purchase has been placed. So in the end, instead of
having a single account and a bunch of devices associated with it and
one bill at the end of the year, you end up with an insane amount of
contracts and no way to organize them until the next year when you get
to redo everything and create new contracts again. And yes, the SCC is
a joke. The amount of money we've lost this year to the work required
to get our contracts straightened out is immense. The system needs an
overhaul and organization.
Justin
Phil Mayers wrote:
> All,
>
> We seem to have an incredibly hard time managing our maintenance contracts.
>
> Quite aside from the vagaries of CCO ("Sorry sir, your contracts have
> disappared from your profile, no TAC access for *you*") we are unable to
> gather all our maintenance into one (or a small number of) contract(s)
> and what contracts we have are very difficult to inventory.
>
> It goes without saying that SCC is a bad joke.
>
> Do any of you manage to do it better? How?
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