By Chris Bartram

I’ve been working with HP maintenance contracts for almost 20 years at various organizations. In the very old days when each site had personal Support Engineers who knew us and our site, contract administration was much easier — mainly because the SE took care of almost all of it for us.

Since those days, the contracts have been getting more complex. Contract changes typically take one week per revision, and often take several revisions before they are correct. In the past 12 years, I have yet to get a quote that was correct the first time for any system that had any kind of modification during the year. It looks like HP’s new Support Contract Assistant (SCA), a free Internet-based service, might change all that.

In our current environment, we have five maintenance contracts with HP. Three center around HP e3000 systems, one is for our XP256 disk array, and one is for our NT-based HP OpenView. Typical quotes are six to 12 pages per system. Two of the three HPe3000 systems had components added or upgrades performed in the past year. Several people previously listed as contacts were no longer applicable. Our entire organization had also moved to a new building since last year.

This year, none of our quotes had correct contact information. By the time we began looking for quotes (about the first week in September, when our fiscal year ends Sept. 30) none were to be found. Shortly before leaving for HP World I called our new contracts support rep, who subsequently faxed me copies of the current quotes, which I took with me to HP World (homework!). One was so jumbled with duplicate items and multiple instances of the same product spread over several pages (vs. just one line item for quantity ‘x’) that I actually retyped the whole contract into an Excel spreadsheet so I could sort it out and figure out what was there — and how much was missing!

In our case, I had 36 pairs of disk drives spread through about six line items of varying quantities across as many pages, each with accompanying power supplies and enclosures — and as it ended up about six pairs were missing. HP adds items to contracts in chronological order, and often no one goes back later to add new items to existing line items. This is necessary at first to accommodate varying warranty end-dates. But once products have gone off warranty, you end up with multiple instances of the same items spread across multiple pages, making it difficult to accurately count and verify what’s there.

Tapping SCA

At HP World I learned about the new HP SCA online service, and was given a demo CD and an invitation to see a demo of the site at a hospitality suite in the Marriott. I attended the demo that evening and was duly impressed. The rep signed me up on the spot (you need a “logon” to access the site) and told me I should get my logon information by e-mail by the time I got back to the office.

I returned to the office after the show and hadn’t received any e-mail yet, but inserted my demo CD and followed the online tour. I then decided to try the site anyway. I opened up my browser (Explorer 4.0 with Service pack 1) and opened the site.

After reading the introduction on the screen, I was surprised to see a chat window pop up in the browser complete with a message from an HP rep online and ready to help me! I informed her that I had signed up but had not received my logon information yet, but was anxious to work on the maintenance quotes we had pending. She promptly verified my information and provided me with a logon and password, and stood by as I logged in. I promptly headed for the quotes screen. Here I had a list of about nine quotes for my five contracts. Apparently some of our previous revisions of quotes (which were done over the phone) were kept by the system, while the revised quotes were added anew.

The screen was well organized and relatively easy to follow. Each quote was listed on a line, and to the right of each were icons for “view quote” and “edit quote.” I clicked on “view quote” for my primary system, which promptly launched a new browser window — while Adobe Acrobat displayed a printable quote identical in every way to those faxed or mailed to me in the past. I printed it and moved on to the next quote.

At this point I started having trouble. Trying to bring up any other quote resulted in Explorer aborting. Reconnecting and logging back in yielded another abort, followed the next time by the entire machine locking up and having to be rebooted. After rebooting, all subsequent attempts to connect to the site yielded more aborts and machine lockups. Apparently cookies or Javascript saved enough state from my last connection to remember to abort me on subsequent attempts.

Connecting from a separate machine running a newer version of Explorer was better, but still had problems. Finally, I downloaded and installed Internet Explorer 5.5 on my PC and tried again. I was finally able to log back in and work on quotes! I reported these problems to the SCA support team; Explorer 4.0 was listed as one of the browser versions that was supported by the site, so I’m not sure where the problem was.

Editing quotes online

Now I’m cooking. I could call up each quote, print a working copy of my local laser printer (which looks exactly like the quotes I got from HP), and set about editing the erroneous items on the quotes.

Editing quotes is about as easy as it could be. First you get a screen listing the major areas on the quote — software support contact, hardware support contact, support agreement contact, equipment location, invoice address, response center callers, actual equipment list, and a selection for general submitting comments. Selecting the contact or address items puts you into a browser form with the old information displayed in fields you can overwrite.

Selecting the equipment list displays all the line items on the screen, one line per line item, with an icon to edit the item. Editing the item gives you options to delete the item, change the quantity, move the item (to another agreement I assume), or add serial numbers to items missing them. I exercised all of the above.

The only option I found slightly confusing was trying to update a tape drive. We had purchased two tapes and only one appeared on the contract. Changing the quantity to ‘2’ didn’t give me the option to enter the serial number for the drive, while adding a serial number didn’t make it evident that the quantity had indeed changed. Adding a button to assist in looking up correct item numbers or options would also be a big help, as in a couple cases where options were wrong (user levels on MPE licenses in my case). I couldn’t determine the correct option to be added, and had to merely leave a “comment” on the line item for a real HP rep to investigate later.

Getting the actual changes committed wasn’t entirely intuitive, but once I figured it out, I did find the process logical. Once you have made all your changes to a selected quote, you have to return to the main “change quote” screen and “review” the changes. Only at that point do you get the option to actually submit the changes. The process was logical enough, but the text pointing you to these steps was very small and easily overlooked. I would have liked something that stood out a bit more.

Additionally, the site offers a very nice “user profile” area. It remembers your preferences for screen sizes, preferred payment methods (including credit card info if you want), payment schedule (annual, monthly, quarterly, etc.), previous purchase orders, tax exemption, and a variety of other handy items.

A few scars

They say pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs, and I have a few scars. After submitting online changes, you’re supposed to get the quotes revised (and have your changes incorporated) within 24 hours. Apparently I got in ahead of some of the HP reps, and about two days after submitting my changes (which still showed ‘pending’ on the Web site), I got apologetic calls from HP reps explaining that they too were just getting used to the new system and had missed seeing my modifications. From there on things moved quickly though, and I had my modifications approved and ready for printing very shortly thereafter.

We’re still working on a few items. Updating HP 3000 user license levels has almost never been straightforward, and our last upgrade never made it into the system. Also, with multiple systems under support, one typically gets flagged as a “primary” while others are secondaries. Unfortunately, those designations aren’t evident in the online versions (aside from price differences).

Payoffs a-plenty

Overall, I am ecstatic over the improvements in the process. HP contract administration has been one of the banes of my existence as an HP e3000 system manager for many years. While there are still some disconnects between the online admins and the site contract reps, the improvement has begun and I am optimistic about where it will take us.

I was also very pleasantly surprised that every time I logged on to SCA I got a chat “popup” from a real live person ready to assist with contracts. They were helpful and friendly, and a couple times when they needed clarification from our site contract rep, they’d actually phone them for me and get the answers directly while I was online!

Unfortunately, when I let them go while I dug into the details of my contracts, I could find no way to call them back later on. (I asked about this and was told that in the next release — by sometime in November — they would be adding a ‘doorbell’ icon we could use to ‘call back’ the online rep whenever we need them. Bravo!)

Thought I haven’t tried it yet, the new system also has a ‘download’ function that will export a spreadsheet-ready copy of your contract for you to review. (That would have saved me some typing!) This will certainly be handy as we update our local hardware and software inventory systems.

Another longstanding issue with HP contracts is the problem with new equipment not getting added to existing contracts on time — especially now, when so many purchases are made through channel partners. I have to believe this new system will pay for itself quickly merely in the increased revenue HP will see from getting new hardware items added to support contracts faster. In the past it often wasn’t noticed until contract renewal time that all that equipment we bought throughout the year didn’t make it onto the support contracts. Being able to call the contracts up from our desktops makes it feasible to check on these items when they’re purchased — even if that’s in the middle of a contract cycle.

While there are still a few kinks in SCA, I look forward to using the new system in the future. This truly appears to be an excellent example of bringing back a “personal experience” to customer service by utilizing Internet technology. Even our local Sun system admin is envious of this new system — in recent years Sun has been much easier to work with in purchasing and support administration than HP. Now the Sun folks have something to look at from HP and be envious! That envy of seeing SCA in action means that E-speak really is spoken here.