Tuesday, 29 May 2007
If a company can be happy spying on its own Board then??
If HP are happy to spy on their own board can they really be trusted when we allow our businesses to be dependant upon them?
Heres a usefull link
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/03/01/hp_kamb_denial/
A great link for information on the Channel.
A great link for information on the Channel.
HP's Integrity in question?
Analysis Sex, lies and flat panel TVs. Dear lord, what has become of HP?
In November of 2005, HP struck out at a group of former executives. It alleged in a lawsuit that the employees used HP's intellectual property, research and funds to create a flat panel TV start-up on the side. At the same time, the workers advanced HP's own flat panel TV business, although with less efficiency than their own endeavor, according to HP.
HP remained clueless about the whole affair until the "ring-leader's" wife served the company with a subpoena during her divorce proceedings. She wanted to know what HP knew about byd:sign Inc., and HP became very curious.
One fantastic lawsuit, however, deserves another. "Ring-leader" Karl Kamb returned fire last week with a lawsuit of his own. And what a lawsuit it is.
Kamb's complaint leads with the "I learned it by watching you" charge familiar (video) to anyone growing up in the US during the 1980s.
In its lawsuit, HP knocked Kamb, the former VP of business and development in Japan, for violating the company's code of conduct and various non-dislcosure understandings.
So what? - Kamb asks, having watched HP implode in the public over the past few months as a result of its reporter and executive spy scandal. "HP expects each of its employees to exhibit 'loyalty' and 'a personal commitment' to the company," his lawsuit states. "HP, however, does not adhere to its own rules.
"For the past several months, HP has been embroiled in a scandal concerning its own ethical misdeeds. Headlines across the country have reported that HP engaged in improper attempts to obtain the telephone records of its own board members, its own employees and members of the media."
And then you get the kicker.
"Karl Kamb is a victim of HP's use of pretexting."
Kamb's lawsuit claims that HP and its "co-conspirators" used information such as his social security number to weasel phone records out of T-Mobile and Sprint.
Even more titillating, the lawsuit portrays HP as instructing Kamb to pay for intelligence about Dell's entry into the printer market. Kamb contacted a Japanese consumer electronics whiz who obtained the desired dirt on Dell and then asked HP to channel its payments through a third party, the lawsuit alleges.
HP, which characterized Kamb's counterclaim as "wholly without merit," can blame itself for opening the gateway to such lawsuits. The company's self-inflicted spy wound makes the pretexting and lack of ethics charges appealing to any party battling HP in court.
"You want to mess with me? Fine, we'll just rehash your spy issues in the press for a few months."
That said, a lengthy confrontation between HP and Kamb appeared inevitable, spy scandal or not, if you read the two sides' complaints.
The HP Way
As HP sees it, Kamb, a former Compaq and then HP executive, recruited a number of helpers during his time in Japan to form a TV and consumer electronics start-up. The helpers included some of HP's top executives such as its director of HP Labs in Japan Mark McEachern and other finance and strategy chiefs, HP alleges.
The start-up "would be separate and apart from HP, and the enterprise would design, develop, manufacture and sell flat panel televisions, monitors and other devices obtained in Japan and East Asia - precisely the kind of products and opportunities that Kamb, McEachern and (others) were supposed to be finding and developing on behalf of HP," HP alleges in its lawsuit.
HP goes on to claim that Kamb channeled HP's funds to a Japanese electronics expert named Katsumi, the former president of Dell Japan, through an LCD maker called Dinner Inc. and through a consulting firm "Imagine That." Some of these consulting fees were then returned to Kamb from "Imagine That," according to HP's lawsuit.
Next, HP alleges that files on company computers, which survived "despite some of the defendants' attempts to erase them" - show the workers and the consultant forming plans to set up a company called byd:sign, which would make LCD and plasma TVs, DVD players and other consumer goods.
By August of 2003, Kamb had purchased the rights to the byd:sign web site, done some negotiating with the US Patent Office and incorporated the company in Texas. "Emboldened" by these moves, Kamb informed his boss that he was "not feeling the love" at HP and had started considering other options. Not wanting to let a star worker go, HP threw more money at Kamb and offered to help him "feel the love" by giving the executive more responsibility.
One month later, Kamb had both a raise from HP and funding for byd:sign. But, despite his side ambitions, he still pitched the flat panel TV business and strategy to HP executives, who "reacted enthusiastically" and planned a meeting between Kamb and CEO Carly Fiorina.
Fiorina in October of 2003 did in fact hear Kamb's ptich.
"Fiorina endorsed Kamb's proposal, and HP placed Kamb on the team in charge of developing that business strategy - unknowingly placing a fox in the henhouse," HP confessed.
Naturally, Kamb then tried to get HP to buy TVs from byd:sign, HP alleges, and started sending confidential documents to his coworkers at the start-up.
HP went on to pay byd:sign $250,000 over three months for consulting services.
Meanwhile, byd:sign started pumping TVs into the US and Japanese markets, while HP still studied the feasibility of such a move.
At the 2004 CES Show, "HP CEO Carly Fiorina publicly announced HP's intent to enter the flat panel television market. HP's display at the show included HP prototype LCD and PDP televisions, which, unbeknownst to HP, were the same televisions that had been manufactured for byd:sign with only the front bezels modified to include HP logos."
It took until March of 2005 for HP to confront Kamb about byd:sign, according to the lawsuit. The executive "denied having any affiliation" with the start-up.
Things, however, changed in August of 2005 when HP received a subpoena from Kamb's wife, who - HP was kind enough to point out - filed for divorce from Kamb citing "adultery." The subpoena asked for information relating to byd:sign, and HP finally got a clue. And now to Kamb's side.
Kamb, of course, sees things very differently from HP.
According to his lawsuit, the Japanese chap Iizuka was not a personal consultant helping out with the start-up but rather the informant HP hired to spy on Dell. In addition, Kamb did not take kickbacks from Iizuka or use HP's money to fund his own start-up.
"Due to the highly covert nature of the Dell data collection project, certain persons within HP erroneously assumed that Kamb had misappropriated funds that were intended for Dinner," the lawsuit states. "HP also erroneously believed that Kamb was using those funds to form a competing company. As a result, HP engaged in clandestine acts to obtain Kamb's private telephone records through false pretenses in order to confirm its suspicions."
Kamb claims to have been called by a supposed T-Mobile worker who asked for his PIN number, which Kamb refused to handout. He then called T-Mobile to report the incident and was told T-Mobile had made no such call. Still, "HP obtained access to Kamb's confidential social security number and billing address" through his employee file and used the data to grab his phone records, according to allegations in the lawsuit. Similar incidents occurred with Sprint.
After being visited by HP investigators, Kamb complained to HP's ethics chief and spy scandal star Kevin Hunsaker about the tactics. "Hunsaker purported to speculate that the attempts to access Kamb's phone records were likely perpetrated in connection with his pending divorce proceeding in Texas."
Cough.
Kamb's lawsuit then cites a memo written by HP's lawyers during the spy scandal which states,
Hunsaker first learned that HP had used pretexting to obtain phone records in July 2005 in connection with an unrelated HP investigation. One of the subjects of that investigation was going through a messy divorce, and his attorney contacted Hunsaker claiming that HP had tried to change his PIN to access his voicemail. Hunsaker's team told him they had not altered the subject's PIN or voicemail, but had used pretexting to obtain phone information about the subject.
Cough.
"The claim that pretexting was involved in this investigation is, to the best of our knowledge, patently untrue," HP said in a statement to The Register.
And the lawsuit goes from there to wag a finger at all of HP's spy scandal cast of characters, including Hunsaker, former Chairwoman Patricia Dunn and hired snoop Ron Delia.
The totality of this mess points to how seriously HP took Dell's entry into the printer market, despite public claims to the contrary. The exhibits in Kamb's lawsuit show executives scrounging for every last detail about Dell's rebranded Lexmark products. And, at about this same time, HP employees were in fact complaining about a printer company spying on them.
As the squabbles between HP and Kamb make their way through court, more dripping details are sure to leak out. Sadly for HP, the juicy counterclaims are much more believable these days than they were a few months ago.
By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View → More by this author
25 Jan 2007 01:28
While his ex-wife discloses HP’s TV sham
In November of 2005, HP struck out at a group of former executives. It alleged in a lawsuit that the employees used HP's intellectual property, research and funds to create a flat panel TV start-up on the side. At the same time, the workers advanced HP's own flat panel TV business, although with less efficiency than their own endeavor, according to HP.
HP remained clueless about the whole affair until the "ring-leader's" wife served the company with a subpoena during her divorce proceedings. She wanted to know what HP knew about byd:sign Inc., and HP became very curious.
One fantastic lawsuit, however, deserves another. "Ring-leader" Karl Kamb returned fire last week with a lawsuit of his own. And what a lawsuit it is.
Kamb's complaint leads with the "I learned it by watching you" charge familiar (video) to anyone growing up in the US during the 1980s.
In its lawsuit, HP knocked Kamb, the former VP of business and development in Japan, for violating the company's code of conduct and various non-dislcosure understandings.
So what? - Kamb asks, having watched HP implode in the public over the past few months as a result of its reporter and executive spy scandal. "HP expects each of its employees to exhibit 'loyalty' and 'a personal commitment' to the company," his lawsuit states. "HP, however, does not adhere to its own rules.
"For the past several months, HP has been embroiled in a scandal concerning its own ethical misdeeds. Headlines across the country have reported that HP engaged in improper attempts to obtain the telephone records of its own board members, its own employees and members of the media."
And then you get the kicker.
"Karl Kamb is a victim of HP's use of pretexting."
Kamb's lawsuit claims that HP and its "co-conspirators" used information such as his social security number to weasel phone records out of T-Mobile and Sprint.
Even more titillating, the lawsuit portrays HP as instructing Kamb to pay for intelligence about Dell's entry into the printer market. Kamb contacted a Japanese consumer electronics whiz who obtained the desired dirt on Dell and then asked HP to channel its payments through a third party, the lawsuit alleges.
HP, which characterized Kamb's counterclaim as "wholly without merit," can blame itself for opening the gateway to such lawsuits. The company's self-inflicted spy wound makes the pretexting and lack of ethics charges appealing to any party battling HP in court.
"You want to mess with me? Fine, we'll just rehash your spy issues in the press for a few months."
That said, a lengthy confrontation between HP and Kamb appeared inevitable, spy scandal or not, if you read the two sides' complaints.
The HP Way
As HP sees it, Kamb, a former Compaq and then HP executive, recruited a number of helpers during his time in Japan to form a TV and consumer electronics start-up. The helpers included some of HP's top executives such as its director of HP Labs in Japan Mark McEachern and other finance and strategy chiefs, HP alleges.
The start-up "would be separate and apart from HP, and the enterprise would design, develop, manufacture and sell flat panel televisions, monitors and other devices obtained in Japan and East Asia - precisely the kind of products and opportunities that Kamb, McEachern and (others) were supposed to be finding and developing on behalf of HP," HP alleges in its lawsuit.
HP goes on to claim that Kamb channeled HP's funds to a Japanese electronics expert named Katsumi, the former president of Dell Japan, through an LCD maker called Dinner Inc. and through a consulting firm "Imagine That." Some of these consulting fees were then returned to Kamb from "Imagine That," according to HP's lawsuit.
Next, HP alleges that files on company computers, which survived "despite some of the defendants' attempts to erase them" - show the workers and the consultant forming plans to set up a company called byd:sign, which would make LCD and plasma TVs, DVD players and other consumer goods.
By August of 2003, Kamb had purchased the rights to the byd:sign web site, done some negotiating with the US Patent Office and incorporated the company in Texas. "Emboldened" by these moves, Kamb informed his boss that he was "not feeling the love" at HP and had started considering other options. Not wanting to let a star worker go, HP threw more money at Kamb and offered to help him "feel the love" by giving the executive more responsibility.
One month later, Kamb had both a raise from HP and funding for byd:sign. But, despite his side ambitions, he still pitched the flat panel TV business and strategy to HP executives, who "reacted enthusiastically" and planned a meeting between Kamb and CEO Carly Fiorina.
Fiorina in October of 2003 did in fact hear Kamb's ptich.
"Fiorina endorsed Kamb's proposal, and HP placed Kamb on the team in charge of developing that business strategy - unknowingly placing a fox in the henhouse," HP confessed.
Naturally, Kamb then tried to get HP to buy TVs from byd:sign, HP alleges, and started sending confidential documents to his coworkers at the start-up.
HP went on to pay byd:sign $250,000 over three months for consulting services.
Meanwhile, byd:sign started pumping TVs into the US and Japanese markets, while HP still studied the feasibility of such a move.
At the 2004 CES Show, "HP CEO Carly Fiorina publicly announced HP's intent to enter the flat panel television market. HP's display at the show included HP prototype LCD and PDP televisions, which, unbeknownst to HP, were the same televisions that had been manufactured for byd:sign with only the front bezels modified to include HP logos."
It took until March of 2005 for HP to confront Kamb about byd:sign, according to the lawsuit. The executive "denied having any affiliation" with the start-up.
Things, however, changed in August of 2005 when HP received a subpoena from Kamb's wife, who - HP was kind enough to point out - filed for divorce from Kamb citing "adultery." The subpoena asked for information relating to byd:sign, and HP finally got a clue. And now to Kamb's side.
Kamb, of course, sees things very differently from HP.
According to his lawsuit, the Japanese chap Iizuka was not a personal consultant helping out with the start-up but rather the informant HP hired to spy on Dell. In addition, Kamb did not take kickbacks from Iizuka or use HP's money to fund his own start-up.
"Due to the highly covert nature of the Dell data collection project, certain persons within HP erroneously assumed that Kamb had misappropriated funds that were intended for Dinner," the lawsuit states. "HP also erroneously believed that Kamb was using those funds to form a competing company. As a result, HP engaged in clandestine acts to obtain Kamb's private telephone records through false pretenses in order to confirm its suspicions."
Kamb claims to have been called by a supposed T-Mobile worker who asked for his PIN number, which Kamb refused to handout. He then called T-Mobile to report the incident and was told T-Mobile had made no such call. Still, "HP obtained access to Kamb's confidential social security number and billing address" through his employee file and used the data to grab his phone records, according to allegations in the lawsuit. Similar incidents occurred with Sprint.
After being visited by HP investigators, Kamb complained to HP's ethics chief and spy scandal star Kevin Hunsaker about the tactics. "Hunsaker purported to speculate that the attempts to access Kamb's phone records were likely perpetrated in connection with his pending divorce proceeding in Texas."
Cough.
Kamb's lawsuit then cites a memo written by HP's lawyers during the spy scandal which states,
Hunsaker first learned that HP had used pretexting to obtain phone records in July 2005 in connection with an unrelated HP investigation. One of the subjects of that investigation was going through a messy divorce, and his attorney contacted Hunsaker claiming that HP had tried to change his PIN to access his voicemail. Hunsaker's team told him they had not altered the subject's PIN or voicemail, but had used pretexting to obtain phone information about the subject.
Cough.
"The claim that pretexting was involved in this investigation is, to the best of our knowledge, patently untrue," HP said in a statement to The Register.
And the lawsuit goes from there to wag a finger at all of HP's spy scandal cast of characters, including Hunsaker, former Chairwoman Patricia Dunn and hired snoop Ron Delia.
The totality of this mess points to how seriously HP took Dell's entry into the printer market, despite public claims to the contrary. The exhibits in Kamb's lawsuit show executives scrounging for every last detail about Dell's rebranded Lexmark products. And, at about this same time, HP employees were in fact complaining about a printer company spying on them.
As the squabbles between HP and Kamb make their way through court, more dripping details are sure to leak out. Sadly for HP, the juicy counterclaims are much more believable these days than they were a few months ago.
By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View → More by this author
25 Jan 2007 01:28
While his ex-wife discloses HP’s TV sham
Friday, 25 May 2007
Leasing a little heads up.
Well we all understand the benefits of leasing but....
One of the areas which suppliers use to "Hide" Margin or profit is within the leasing.There are a host of ways suppliers will "hide" Profit
Heres an example
You order £50,000 of hardware on a lease to upgrade your old copiers.
You are 3.5 years into a 5 year contract
The settlement of your old copiers is £21,000
You have negotiated a really good price for your £50,000 hardware, you got 3 proposals etc etc
Do you realise that your supplier makes between 2.5% and 15% margin on the leasing? 7% approx is pretty standard
So 7% of £71,000 is ? £4,970
That doesn't even include the Margin on the Hardware or services or service contract.
Thats one very simple example of how profit can be created.
Whats more they arn't making £4,970 because of a product or service they have offered you.
They provide the leasing directly for a number of reasons.
1) It improves their cashflow as they get paid within 48hrs of installation
2) They get title to the equipment when its contract is settled or expires
3) They (Usually the Dealership owners) get a very healthy margin from the leasing
4) When they get title and have the equipment back they then sell it on as refurbished and whatever they get is again pure profit.
One of the areas which suppliers use to "Hide" Margin or profit is within the leasing.There are a host of ways suppliers will "hide" Profit
Heres an example
You order £50,000 of hardware on a lease to upgrade your old copiers.
You are 3.5 years into a 5 year contract
The settlement of your old copiers is £21,000
You have negotiated a really good price for your £50,000 hardware, you got 3 proposals etc etc
Do you realise that your supplier makes between 2.5% and 15% margin on the leasing? 7% approx is pretty standard
So 7% of £71,000 is ? £4,970
That doesn't even include the Margin on the Hardware or services or service contract.
Thats one very simple example of how profit can be created.
Whats more they arn't making £4,970 because of a product or service they have offered you.
They provide the leasing directly for a number of reasons.
1) It improves their cashflow as they get paid within 48hrs of installation
2) They get title to the equipment when its contract is settled or expires
3) They (Usually the Dealership owners) get a very healthy margin from the leasing
4) When they get title and have the equipment back they then sell it on as refurbished and whatever they get is again pure profit.
Xerox sells less but makes more?
Sometimes, low revenues portend good news. Take the Xerox Corporation. For the fifth quarter in a row, its revenues from copiers and printers have gone down. But ask Anne M. Mulcahy, the chief executive, what she plans to do about that, and her answer is, absolutely nothing. Dollars from equipment sales may be down but Xerox is placing a lot of machines. And that, Ms. Mulcahy insists, is what counts. “We will not sacrifice profitability to grow equipment revenues,” she said in an interview yesterday. “But we will sacrifice equipment revenues to drive profitability.” In the document-processing world, that makes total sense. Printer and copier companies make the most money from sales of toners, inks and services. And those sales, of course, are directly proportional to the number of machines being used. Xerox has always known that, but it is finally acting on it. Since January it has introduced 19 new products, more than all of last year. And it has been sharply cutting prices for its machines — hence the revenue declines — to sell more of them. “For 30 years, Xerox raised prices so it wouldn’t have to worry about costs,” noted Ulysses S. Yannas, a broker at Buckman, Buckman & Reid. “Now it is doing the opposite.” The new approach is working. According to Infotrends, a research firm, Xerox accounts for half of the pages produced on high-speed digital color presses. Black and white printing is not doing nearly as well, but analysts note that color printing offers about five times the profit of monochrome for Xerox. “Xerox really has a strong, wide portfolio, and they’ve put in place the engines to drive top-line growth,” said Angèle Boyd, a vice president of the research firm IDC. Xerox’s quarterly numbers reflect the favorable skew. Revenue for the first three months of 2007 was $3.8 billion, up 4 percent from last year. About 70 percent came from supplies and services. Xerox earned $233 million, a 17 percent rise from the comparable quarter in 2006. That came out to 24 cents a share, which beat analysts’ estimates by 4 cents. Costs are down, and will soon go down more — Xerox is leaving its lush headquarters in Stamford, Conn., for sparser space in Norwalk. Xerox said it would earn $1.12 to $1.16 a share for the year — and expected it would be closer to the high end. Investors applauded, sending Xerox shares up 52 cents, to $18.60. Still, some investors remain concerned that Xerox has not proved that it can deliver brisk growth. “The good quarter was driven by the cost structure, and we aren’t convinced that the revenue situation has been resolved,” said Jack L. Kelly, an analyst with Goldman Sachs. Neither is Timothy M. Ghriskey, chief investment officer at Solaris Asset Management. Mr. Ghriskey agrees with all of Ms. Mulcahy’s strategies — but he is not buying Xerox shares. “The competition Xerox is facing for sales is just formidable,” he said. Indeed it is. Xerox remains the dominant player in the market for high-speed printers, for example, but others are nipping at its heels. “Xerox has been in the lead, but Kodak and Canon and Ricoh have been coming up fast,” said Patricia Sorce, co-director of the Printing Industry Center at the Rochester Institute of Technology. So has the Dutch company Oce. This week, Oce introduced a high-speed continuous feed printer — the paper goes through on rolls rather than cut sheets — that it plans to market to book publishers. And last year it introduced a high-speed cut-sheet machine that can simultaneously print on both sides of a sheet. Jan Hull, an Oce senior vice president, insisted that Oce is “already ahead of plan” to grab at least a 20 percent share of the high-speed market in the next four to five years. Ricoh, meanwhile, already commands a large share of the market for office printers, and has new high-speed printers coming out next year. Ricoh is also in the process of buying I.B.M.’s printing operations. “I.B.M. is really strong in the market for mission-critical applications like printing bills or checks,” said Ron Potesky, vice president for corporate product marketing at the Ricoh Americas Corporation. Ms. Mulcahy seems unworried. “Yes, there are a lot of people with aspirations, but we have a tremendous head start,” she said. Xerox has been on a buying spree of its own. This month it announced it was spending $1.5 billion to buy Global Imaging, a major distributor of office equipment to small and medium-size businesses. Until now, Global sold almost all brands except Xerox, but analysts expect that its 200,000 customers will be easily persuaded to switch brands. “Global has always offered great service, and its customers care more about that than the brand of machine,” said Shannon S. Cross, an analyst at Cross Research who rates Xerox shares a buy. Ms. Mulcahy points straight at Global when anyone questions her commitment to growth. “Buying Global was all about growing revenues,” she said. “So you could say we just invested $1.5 billion in a big catalyst for growth.” Published Saturday, April 21, 2007Prices Are Lower, but Profit Is Up at XeroxCLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
HP putting its money where its mouth is? Or just defending its base?
HP is putting its mouth where its money is by offering 2,300 of its key account customers a printer consultancy service.Bruce Dahlgren, senior vice president of worldwide enterprise sales for HP's imaging and printing group, said the company will officially launch the service next year and is currently hiring account managers and technical, services and business process consultantsHe says the move is to help the key accounts to consolidate their current printer investments by working out where to use standard printers and where to position multifunction printers (MFPs) across their enterprises.The service will be an ongoing partnership to help these customers tackle the difficult challenge of producing efficient document workflows. It will also use HP's network of business partners to help create a closer relationship with the customers and try to define ready-made policies within vertical market segments, such as the public sector, healthcare and financial organisations.Dahlgren says the service will not only cover the deployment of products from HP's range of over 200 imaging products, but will also embrace competitive products from other manufacturers. Despite this, the core competencies of the consulting teams will align with HP's products and services.He added that he is not just seeking to lure employees from other printer makers, but wants people from outside the printing world to gain fresh insights into the relationship imaging products have with workflows, networks, and server deployments.HP feels the company needs to develop a closer relationship with its enterprise accounts to shape and customise future imaging products. What Dahlgren did not cover was the fact that HP has only taken two per cent of the copier market despite its large push into this area over past few years.Photocopier manufacturers have converged with the printer market as laser and inkjet MFPs have increased their speeds and versatility to almost obliterate the photocopier market. Winners in the field tend to be companies like Canon which has established itself as a photocopier and printer supplier prior to the convergence.HP's task is to dislodge the loyal customers and win them over to its own technologies. Consultancy will provide a platform for this. Dahlgren says he initial service will be expanded to smaller account holders over timeBy Eric Doyle in San Franciscohttp://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/10/0...ng_consultants/
Tips for a better Photocopier Deal
1 Make sure you know the RRP (Recommended Retail Price) or SSP (Suggested Selling Price) of the equipment you are looking at purchasing.
Once you have this ensure you get a minimum of 50% discount never buy a photocopier with less than 50% discount.
Often you can get a discount much higher than this but if your being offered less than 50% discount they are trading on your ignorance of the market.
2) Find out the maximum monthly volume that your machine is covered to produce by the service contract. Get this in writing and get it from the Service manager NOT the salesperson.
Why?
Because when your machine starts to become unreliable the most common cause given to you by your supplier will be "Its because its being overworked"
Which can be true but is often a ploy to get you to upgrade early or to upgrade to a larger machine or both.
So why the service manager?
Well simply because the salesman will often no longer be with the company or have moved into a different role. They then say he had no authorisation to make such claims, its a common ploy to blaim everything on the previous salesperson.
The other is its got nothing to do with the salesman and isnt his responcibilty or area of expertise.
3) Service costs, be as diligent about getting the best service cost as you are about the cost of the hardware.
Two things ask for a price freeze on the service costs upfront in writing on the contract something along the lines of "Service price to be held for 3 years from installation"
The other is next time you get a letter stating there will be a price increase on your service contract write back challenging it. Say your unhappy to accept an increase and request a breakdown of all the service visits in the last 12 months, including faults fixed responce times and terms of cancellation should you decide to cancel.
Why? well most customers simply accept any price increase as long as its not perceived to be too high and many suppliers simply send out increases on that basis so that the clients that challenge it simply get a letter apologising saying they shouldnt have received an increase letter or more common they simply cancel it.
Once you have this ensure you get a minimum of 50% discount never buy a photocopier with less than 50% discount.
Often you can get a discount much higher than this but if your being offered less than 50% discount they are trading on your ignorance of the market.
2) Find out the maximum monthly volume that your machine is covered to produce by the service contract. Get this in writing and get it from the Service manager NOT the salesperson.
Why?
Because when your machine starts to become unreliable the most common cause given to you by your supplier will be "Its because its being overworked"
Which can be true but is often a ploy to get you to upgrade early or to upgrade to a larger machine or both.
So why the service manager?
Well simply because the salesman will often no longer be with the company or have moved into a different role. They then say he had no authorisation to make such claims, its a common ploy to blaim everything on the previous salesperson.
The other is its got nothing to do with the salesman and isnt his responcibilty or area of expertise.
3) Service costs, be as diligent about getting the best service cost as you are about the cost of the hardware.
Two things ask for a price freeze on the service costs upfront in writing on the contract something along the lines of "Service price to be held for 3 years from installation"
The other is next time you get a letter stating there will be a price increase on your service contract write back challenging it. Say your unhappy to accept an increase and request a breakdown of all the service visits in the last 12 months, including faults fixed responce times and terms of cancellation should you decide to cancel.
Why? well most customers simply accept any price increase as long as its not perceived to be too high and many suppliers simply send out increases on that basis so that the clients that challenge it simply get a letter apologising saying they shouldnt have received an increase letter or more common they simply cancel it.
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