The 95% and 98% Uptime Guarantee for Copiers
The 95% and 98% Uptime Guarantee for Copiers.
Sounds good… Gives me warm fuzzy feelings… But what does it really mean?
A friend of mine told me that people shouldn’t be allowed to do math publicly so please bear with me for a minute.
An average month has 4.33 weeks. An average month has 173.2 business hours. If we multiply 173.2 hours by the 95% Uptime Guarantee, we find that the equipment is guaranteed to be operational 164.5 hours per month. Continuing this train of thought, if we subtract 164.5 hours from 173.2 hours we find the 95% Uptime Guarantee means the device will be unusable 8.66 hours per month and still meet the Uptime Guarantee. If your prospective supplier is offering a 98% Uptime Guarantee then the device will be inoperable about 3.5 hours per month.
Don’t worry, everything is good. Your supplier has promised they can meet these obligations, and they won’t even break a sweat doing so. At this point, you may be thinking that this is just the way it is; it’s always been this way.
Or you might be asking, “Is there something better, and are there Best Practices we could employ?”
The short answer is yes.
If experience has taught me anything it has taught me to read the fine print very carefully and be aware of the details of this type of performance guarantee. Some of the details I would be looking for are:
- What will constitute a down machine?
- Whose opinion will determine if a machine is up or down? (Mine or the technicians?)
- What response time is the vendor guaranteeing? (If it’s between 2 and 6 hours I’ve got problems before the agreement is signed.)
- When will the clock start? (When the service call is placed or when the technician arrives on site?)
- When will the clock stop? (When the technician arrives on site or when the device is fully functional?)
- Who is going to keep track of all this?
