After Ultimate IEM solutions are lunched, a happy customer signs the contract for technical support with one of Ultima’s authorized partners.
You may choose any one of them.
Can you provide support with your own IT staff, without involving an outside Ultimate partner?
Yes, you can.
A few details on each of the support schemes.
1. Contract with an outside Ultimate partner
Works are completed and paid for on a time & material basis – i.e. according to the quantity of man-hours.
The minimum support budget is 4 programming hours per year per one Ultimate Solid license.
Hour rates are fixed, our partners cannot change them:
| Programmer (per hour) | $ 80 |
| Analyst (per hour) | $ 100 |
Rates seem to be just a bit lower than those of SAP. This suggests that the cost of post installation support of Ultimate IEM solutions is about the same as the cost of SAP solutions support. This conclusion it wrong, however.
The final cost is a result of multiplying the rate by the man hours spent. According to the statistics we have accumulated on implementation of comparable tasks in Ultimate and in SAP, the latter case requires time by an order of magnitude more.
Literally, ‘by an order of magnitude’: to implement the same task, an Ultimate developer will spent 10 times less man-hours, than a SAP developer.
The customer pays only for completed works.
No payments for nothing – like 20% of the cost of licenses yearly that our dear foreign colleagues take just
because.
The works are executed only according to the requests from authorized employees placed via an online tracker.
Which, by the way, has lots of features, such as budgeting, analytics, linked tasks management, appointing activity owners, etc. It’s all transparent.
Each quarter the Ultina Partner Center (independently from the partners) assesses the level of customer satisfaction with post-installation support according to the following questionnaire:
-
A
Use of Ultimate IEM solutions has a definite positive effect on the company’s operational
performance. The Ultimate servicing partner’s consultants have high business competence
and regularly suggest effective solutions for business processes optimization, which lead
to increase in profits and/or decrease of costs. -
B
It’s difficult to draw a distinct line between the positive effect of the Ultimate solution
and other factors; however, we are definitely satisfied by both the results of using
the software and the co-operation with the Ultimate servicing partner. -
C
The Ultimate IEM system is installed. It is up and running.
There are no other significant achievements. -
D
We’ve been cheated. The reality has nothing to do with what you promise on your website.
If the service level assessment of a partner is not complimentary enough, it loses our authorization.
So, Ultimate takes more than good care of its customes’ satisfaction even after the system has been launched.
2. In-house support of Ultimate IEM solutions
First of all, here’s why you shouldn’t support Ultimate IEM solutions (as well as any other solutions) with your own staff.
Then again, a homo sapiens is a creature that can only learn from his own mistakes.
Moreover, not even every member of the species is able to do that.
So you’d better:
— certify at least one business analyst and one developer,
— pay yearly subscription for a self-service Ultimate license (see the prices)
| |
|
|---|---|
| Total per year | $ 0 |
| Montly payment | $ 0 |
and — good luck with your in-house support.