Support contracts for HP Latex 26500

[John Dorling]

Also interested as my warranty is about to run out.

[Jamie Wood]

Have you thought about insurance instead of support contracts? We have our machines
covered by insurance policies, which are considerably cheaper than contracts. They are
covered for accidental or malicious damage, so if you have a head crash, it is covered.

You can use whichever company you like for repairs, and send the bill to the insurers,
who pay in full, less your excess. Your policy payments do not increase for the duration
of the policy (usually 4 or 5 years) irrespective of how many claims you have. Works for
us.

[David McDonald]

Hi Jamie

Sounds good – who’s that with?

Although we’ve had an odd issue where nothing physical was broken or damaged and the print degradation was due to the electronics – can’t see how how the insurance would cover that?

Cheers
Macky

[Jamie Wood]

Ours is with Bluefin, and is underwritten by Aviva. Bluefin details:-

0161 429 9032
http://www.bluefingroup.co.uk

We have a number to contact Aviva directly whenever we have a problem, and looking
at the policy, loss or damage to the machinery caused by breakdown is also covered.
Costs are in the region of £1250 per year for 2 machines (not each).

[Stafford Cox]

You could try Perfect Colours too. They do a lot of Latex stuff.

[Andrew Edwards]

Hi

Whilst you would expect me to fly the flag for our Latex Service there is an important difference that is often overlooked between an ArtSystems HP warranty from the UK Latex dealer network and a Time & Materials contract (i.e everything else)

When you take out an ArtSystems HP warranty, we pay HP an amount to guarantee parts availability for you. This Service Level Agreement means that HP will supply parts we don’t have in our stock next day – we then send the engineer in with the part to apply the fix.

If you are on a T&M contract (what you have to source when you are insured) there is no SLA and as such HP will supply parts through a standard process that can run from days to weeks depending on the part.

A T&M contract customer is at the back of the queue for non-locally stocked parts behind warrantied customers and a proposed fix date can be pushed back to accommodate new warranty calls.

As you can imagine a T&M customer is rarely explained this vital difference by a 3rd party and it only comes to light in moments of great stress and difficulty for the business leading to difficult conversations re Service expectations.

Thus I want to avoid the usual comparisons with non-qualified engineers etc and concentrate on this crucial point – yes a T&M contract is cheaper (especially if insured) due to the fact there is no payment back to HP to secure parts availability.

Hopefully you can survive for a week or two without the Latex but many smaller companies can’t so it’s better that this vital difference is discussed and handled now when all is running OK and not in the midst of a breakdown crisis.

Andrew