Making Installs Easy

One of the challenges of installing hardware and software for a client is getting any of the information that you will need at the time of installation from them. Some companies have certain policies that have the potential to delay, or even to cancel any new install. Every company is different, and it never ceases to amaze me how often these businesses do not even know who to contact to get access to some pretty simple information on their IT infrastructure.

Then there are those businesses who are very concerned about their networks, and prohibit any piece of equipment being attached without three weeks of internal meetings, only to find that you cannot actually do the install when you get to site because they don’t like people attaching stuff to their network when some important trade show is on.

In order to resolve some of these issues at install, we are working on a documentation pack for our customers. Right near the start is a sheet saying the information we need, and then further in goes into what we do and how we do it. What we are hoping is that by doing this pre-work that we can reduce the time on site significantly. It would not worry us too much if the time on site was productive, but time waiting for this type of information tends to be unproductive.

Worse still, often this information is unavailable on the day and the installer needs to come back another day. Experience has shown that at least an hour of installers time will be wasted returning to site. More likely, wasted times will be much longer when travel time and waiting is accounted for.

We know that providing the documentation to the customer before we get there will not solve every problem, but we hope it will save a few