[BC] billing for software support

[Edwin Bukont]

I successfully went after Marketron in 1998 or so because of the amount of man hours spent on their software. 
 
I got the GM's attention with this logic "what other employee on the staff gets paid $60,000 a year, can't get their job done, blames everyone else and thus everyone else does the job for them, and keeps their job? 
 
Marketron flew someone out, who I kept at the station for a week, until there were NO problems running their apps on the network.  And we got @ $20k in support fees refunded.
 
I was almost as lucky the second time I took on Marketron.  In that case, there was also a lazy employee problem.  This person never had the time to call Marketron for assistance and could never stay around when Marketron was called.  Which didn't totally absolve Marketron.  I will give credit to Prophet for pointing out the flaw in Marketron's response to the linking question we had.
 
Nobody believed me,,,so I sent another contractor in to help.  Now Marketron couldn't blame 'your engineer' again, since it was a different person, but, to his credit, the GSM realized real quick that the songs from Marketron and one staff person were exactly the same,,,so changes were made. 
 
The folks at XM spent $2M upfront for PowerGold.  There was a 2-person IT crew assigned to that product during the rollout.  I clearly remember the IT manager telling his crew, 'your job is to tell me what is wrong.  your job is NOT to fix it.  We paid PowerGold for a product and as long as it remains their IP, it remains their problem."  Pretty much sums up my approach to fixing someone else's design issues without accomodation for my time and talent. 
 
I sent back an entire RCS MC V14, and got my $110k back,,,and at another station, refused to pay an RCS on-site support bill.  Both arose form the inability of RCS to make their product work as promised, even when running in standalone mode with station peripherals disconnected.  On the disputed on-site bill, I had kept careful notes and got a revisit, nearly 2 weeks of service overall, before I paid the SECOND bill and got a credit on the first.
 
You absolutely need to show the GM the value of your time on these repeat 'off the radar' tasks, and how he is loosing your value when you provide services to others rather than to your employer.  A smart GM will realize that these same concerns are probably occuring throught out the plant, with other software and vendor-supported functions that the engineer does not touch.  Document your time.  It's a pain in the ass, but you aren't the janitor either.

Edwin Bukont CSRE, DRB, CBNT 
V- 240.417.2475; F- 240.368.1265 
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