Discover the PcVue Solutions Master Series
Mini-series that inform you on everything you need to know to [supervise] your systems!
Each series is split in several articles on our blogs and episodes on our Youtube channel.
Season 1: “The 6 questions to ask when choosing your supervisory platform”
This first series aims to guide you in choosing the right SCADA platform for your needs.
S1E3 – What about the technical support ?
Is the publisher able to bring appropriate technical support at the right level?
Having a good understanding of the platform with appropriate training is a must if you need to develop your application. The question to ask is, will you be supported later?
Why is a good technical support important ?
The success of a project is mainly a good mastery of the product you choose. After the necessary training phase it is mandatory to get advice and relevant support from the provider.
Incomplete mastery of a product sometimes associated with the unavailability of the vendors’ technical support can cause serious issues when carrying out your project. 
Starting with the foundation of an application, its architectures: the wrong choice of architectures may lead to system malfunction and poor performance among others.
During development phases, the lack of knowledge in “best practices” can generate significant time loss and delicate application maintenance.
The questions to ask about the technical support
It is therefore the experience of the technical support engineers of the vendor that makes the difference to avoid known pitfalls and to make the right design choices during your development.
Here are some of the top questions to ask to help you avoid the classic pitfalls:
ü Is local technical support available and can it react quickly?
This will reduce intervention times and costs in case technical assistance is needed. It also creates a special relationship based on trust that does not exist with impersonal centralized technical support. This can makes a big difference when you are facing issues and you know that you’ll got covered by someone you can trust.
ü Is the vendor’s technical support experienced and is it working closely with products R&D team in case of advanced questions?
The capability to quickly access to the relevant expert to answer complex issue is a major question about a technical support. It will save a lot of time and energy. It will also allow improving the product taken into account the field needs.
ü Can the vendor provide guidance during critical phases of the project to analyze if my development is going in the right direction? Can they assist me in optimizing my project?
ü Does the vendor offer online resources that allow me to be as autonomous as possible? (FAQ, sample projects, knowledge base, tutorials, etc).
To sum up, choose a supplier that will be able to provide support wherever you are, with enough experience to understand your requirements, and able to involve R&D in case of advanced questions.
The success of your project does not only rely on your choice of solution but also on the quality of customer services throughout its lifecycle!
You can discover our customer care solutions here: https://www.pcvuesolutions.com//support-a-services
And watch the video for episode 3 on YouTube !
The upcoming episode 4 will deal with proven experience and success stories.
This article includes contents created by Matthew Waring – “untitled image”
Created on: 30 Sep 2019
