Protective Preventative Maintenance

You have just invested in a new vehicle, the one of your dreams, and you take it on a trip across Canada. You only put gas in it and drive sightseeing and following your nose. Filters and oil changes are ignored. The car breaks down in the middle of that long stretch of road between Manitoba and Alberta. It takes two days to get you up and running and the bill is more than a year's worth of oil changes and regular maintenance. Just like the family vehicle, your business computer systems require regular maintenance to ensure optimum system performance and uptime to prevent productivity losses.

What really happens during system failure?

• The user is unable to do their job using the productivity tools you have provided
• Potentially this may affect two or more employees if their activities are linked
• The system failure may be enterprise wide, causing everyone down time
• The failure may happen at the "worst possible time". Closing date for an RFP submission, payroll, month-end or year-end or ????
• There may be total data loss
  The people affected must contact the support person and explain the issue. Hopefully, the service provider is immediately available and they must only wait while the technician travels to the site. Once on site, the technician must diagnose the problem and implement the repair.

• Will parts be needed?
• Will they need to be ordered?
• Will a temporary loaner be required?
• Will software need to be reloaded?
• Will software support need to be contacted?

All of these will add to the time to resolve the problem. During this time one or more of your staff will be unable to do their job using the tools provided. How much money is lost in employee downtime, lost sales opportunities, damaged client information, investments to rebuild data, and potentially no available back-up? Emergency callout rates for the service provider may be in effect. Express shipping costs, Software support costs, and data recovery costs may apply. You are looking at an expensive solution!

What is the cost of a pro-active repair?
With an affordable investment, you will find a program of regularly scheduled preventive maintenance to be most valuable and the best return on your dollar. This type of activity will avoid down time and loss of production from employees. Your investment would pay for itself by eliminating a major system failure or data loss.

• Loss of service to user scheduled for a time of minimum requirements. User can pre-plan alternate activity
• Cost of labour at reduced prescheduled rate
• Cost of parts without emergency shipping costs

Find a solid company that will provide a program of regularly scheduled maintenance visits who will become familiar with your computer and network system. That technician should visit the site and document all computer and networking hardware, peripherals and all operating systems, productivity and application software. This will give you both a solid understanding of the current network environment and will provide a starting point for a preventive maintenance program. This site visit will also enable you to analyze and improve efficiencies within your system.

There are many other advantages in this type of process that should include:

• Reduces the incidence of emergency and service calls.
• IT service able to be budgeted for more accurately.
• Proactive preventive maintenance solves issues before they become problems.
• Reduces IT cost per user by improving system uptime and productivity.
• Discounted hourly rate based on a minimum site visit.
• Timely accounting for all work performed.
• Dependable and reliable tools to operate your business.

When you invest in a tool to get your work done, you would not think of not maintaining it and your network system is no different; it is a critical tool that needs to be maintained. Plan for it, budget for it and it will give you a solid system to improve your bottom line.