Question on Varian's Customer Support Agreement--Summary
Dear all,
Recently I have asked a question on Varian's Customer Support
Agreement. I have received a total of a dozen responses which are
all very helpful to us. You may be interested in reading the
summary below, to which I have done minor editing so that not to reveal a
few sensitive $ figures.
Thanks to all who has contributed to this summary. Your info and
experiences are indeed very helpful to our decision making (soon).
Best regards,
Wei
My original question:
Our INOVA-600's two year warranty period is about to end. Now we have
to make a decision on whether to sign a Limited Parts Exchange (LPX)
agreement for $xx/yr or take the 'pay as we go' route. We would like to
hear those of you from a university facility, who had faced this decision
before and your experience on either having or not having the agreement.
We are interested in how frequent parts like amplifiers and boards need
to be replaced.
Responses:
1) My Inova 500 has not needed any parts since it was installed in
January 1999. The spectrometer collects multidimensional data all hours
of the week except when I do cryogen fills, so it is pulsing all the
time.
Oh, I forgot: the PFG coil in the probe had to be resoldered
twice.
2) Never have, never have a problem (four instruments, Varian INova up to
500 MHz). The only thing that breaks are probes and they aren't covered.
Varian provides good trouble shooting over the phone so if you have an
electronics specialist you will generally be in good shape and able to
trouble shoot down to the board level. Board Swaps aren't real bad (I
guess we have made two) and they aren't real expensive. Much less than
the $xx would seem to buy you.
3) We have two INOVA spectrometers, a 500 that's ~4 yrs old, and a 2yr
old 600. The 600 has needed no repairs outside of warranty, but did have
a problem with the backplane, which if it had to have been handled
outside of the warranty period would have cost a bundle. Even so, it
still would not have approached $xx!
The 500 has had a few problems, but I see over the 4 yrs that we have
spent less than $2k on it, outside of probe fixes (another $2.5k total
there).
Be interested in what others tell you,
4) No agreement here, our two INOVA 500s are now one yearand two yearsout
of warranty without any problems (outside of an "unglued" probe
capacitor). Previously on a INOVA300 we had,one of the digital card cage
boards was replaced at around 5 years. I certainly didn't have the money
to spend on a service agreement, so its cross your fingers and
wait!
5) We're a pretty small operation, being a liberal arts college. We did
the
LPX originally on our VXR 300 but it was killing us, and we certainly
could not afford it long-haul. So I took the two-week in-depth
maintenance course ($10,000, as I recall), dropped the LPX, and have been
very satisfied since. One thing that has helped is that Varian service
for us is just an hour away, so site visits aren't too bad. But the LPX
doesn't cover labor, does it? So by taking the course, I could diagnose
and order--and, I might say, even diagnose chips--myself and save a
bundle. That reminds, me I have to unsolder that resister I put on the VT
board to bypass the broken probe overheat circuit.....
6.1) Our INOVA 400 and 500 instruments went out of warranty early last
summer.
I had previously persuaded our instrumentation committee that the
almost
$xx annual fee for an LPX agreement seemed like too much money for
what
we would receive (you know the details of the LPX agreement).
Our facility is equipped with a good electronics shop and I personally
enjoy
(and am reasonably good at) diagnostics and repairs. I was also able to
spend some funds to purchase additional testing equipment, as a
consequence
of not spending the annual $xx.
We have had a limited number of difficult problems with our 500 since the
warranty expired. One was a spinning problem and in the other case the
PTS
shot craps. In both cases the diagnostics were tedious and the origin not
at
all obvious; both cases apparently added to the Varian knowledge base.
The
former problem could not have been solved with a part swap; the latter
case
was a very intermittent problem. I also have 2 more difficult and
intermittent
problems on my plate. The point in all this is that I believe that if I
could not
have solved these myself, we would have had to call a Varian service
engineer
out---at the going service rate minus 10%---to the tune of a heft bill
anyway,
in spite of the LPX contract.
By the way, Varian wanted nearly $xx for a PTS620 synthesizer. A
new
one from PTS costs $9000, and I got ours repaired at PTS for $750 plus
shipping,
including priority bench service and a 6-month warranty. One ongoing
problem
is with the VT controller; I am working directly with Highland Technology
on this
matter.
You may know that all non-warranty phone support is done by Phil
Louthan.
Phil seems knowledgeable and has always provided very quick responses; I
am
completely happy with this arrangement. To me, it seems that anyone
with
reasonable diagnostic skills and equipment at hand could forgo the
LPX
contract. These are my experiences and "2 cents
worth."
6.2) Just to add a bit more information to what I quickly shot off last
evening:
For our two instruments that were installed in June 2001, we have
experienced these failures:
Data-to-memory board replaced, covered by original warranty, also would
be covered under LPX;
Sun Ultra 10 CPU replaced, covered by original Sun warranty, would not be
covered under LPX;
PTS620 repaired,out of original warranty, would be covered under LPX,
~$1000 total repair cost (PTS), ~$xx Varian quote for a new PTS, not the
"obvious" suspect in trouble shooting;
Sample spinning problem, out of original warranty, would be
"minimally" covered under LPX if at all,
diagnostics and solution were labor intensive.
From my experiences in other NMR facilities, with both Varian and
Bruker, true component failures are not typically frequent occurrences;
my "guesstimate" is an average on the order of one significant
component failure per year, meaning a board, etc. with a cost of a few
thousand dollars. To restate, if one's entire diagnostic repertoire
consisted of only swapping components, then such methods would tend to be
costly. However, with reasonable test equipment and diagnostic skills,
one should be able
to unambiguously isolate the trouble to the component/module level and
thus eliminate expenses related to guessing.
When we were in the stages of deciding how to proceed with regard to an
LPX contract, I found Varian's Ed Manzanares (888-827-4267 ext. 204) to
be a great help; he gave me information about typical costs for
spectrometer components---some of which appear to be greatly
inflated.
7) we were faced with the same dilemma one year ago. We opted to go
the pay as you go route. So far so good. I mostly miss the phone support
but learned to do without. We had one amplifier failure and repaired it
in house. . Goof Luck.
8) In the last two years we have had a PTS and a Power amplifier that
need to be replaced. The machines were about 5 years old when that
happened. These were on different systems, but these things do happen.
The list price for replacement
of these items was more than the LPX contract, although I am sure that
Varian would give you a trade in on the old part and that would reduce
your costs. Amazingly we have not had to replace any of the boards
during this time.
Our concern is the probes which are used very heavily doing 3D/4D
heteronuclear experiments on proteins and nucleic acids for almost the
whole time. These we get fixed
about every 2 years.
We could not afford to pay for this as the facility, so we signed
ourselves up as a core facility and got funding through an
interdepartmental program project grant for 50% support of service
contracts and make the rest up through user fees.
If you can afford it, I would say it is worth it.
9) We have two VXR-S instruments without service contract. They seem to
run reliably. Varian tries to give free advice within 24 hours which is a
great help. Some of the boards are expensive, but those don't seem to
fail often. Do you mind/like to trouble shoot instrument
problems?
10) 5 years, no problems with our hardware. We try to set aside
$10,000/year towards the day when a $40,000 part fails. Otherwise it's
available for upgrades. This is not possible in some academic
environments. Our chem dept., for example, would lose leverage to beg
extra funds from the university if they had $10,000 "just sitting
there".
I'm interested in the results of your survey. Most managers I've talked
to didn't go for service contracts, nor LPX, or TAPS. It's
generally cheaper to be self-insured, if you can without risking
bankruptcy. Instrument failure is a valid reason to beg emergency funds.
Any good college administrator I think would choose a 50% chance of
paying $40,000 over 5 years, versus a definite expense of $80,000.
(They'd probably even part with the $40K willingly if you could pose them
with the decision first).
But software, on the other hand, is a constant source of headaches and
need for help.
11) I have an Inova 500 and 600, installed in summer and fall of
1998, respectively. We can't afford even the parts exchange agreement, so
we don't have any service agreement. The only major problem that we had
was a gradient amp that died during the warranty period (fortunately).
Since the warranty expired I have had to replace two temperature
controller cables at about $200 each and one 12 volt power supply at
about $250. I could have saved about $100 on the power supply by getting
it from Mouser, but I wanted to check to see if Varian had done any
modifications to it. They hadn't.
I have had problems with the shim power supply on the 600. It blew a fuse
about a year ago and I replaced the fuse and got ready to start chasing a
fault. It worked fine for a month, then blew four of the eight fuses at
the same time. I pulled it out and did a visual check on all the boards,
then put in new fuses and put it back in the console.
After spending a day with my head stuck in the console checking
everything I could think of to check I couldn't find a problem. It has
worked fine ever since. I suspect it will die again someday when I am
insanely busy.
12) Your question was indeed valid, as I don't maintain any service
contracts (not even parts-only) on my Varian systems because the price is
indeed prohibitive for poor academic institutions like us. I've only been
here at xxxx (all Varian instruments) for a year and a half, and our
"pay-as-you-go" method hasn't yet cost as much as a parts-only
contract for one instrument (and I have 4 Varian systems in my facility).
I maintain a Standing Purchase Order for about $25,000 to cover parts
orders, and I've only used about $5,000 so far in the past 1 1/2
years.
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Wei Wycoff (Ph. D.)
125 Chemistry Building
601 S. College Ave.
Department of Chemistry
University of Missouri-Columbia
Columbia, MO 65211
USA
Phone: (573)-882-3291
Fax: (573)-882-2754
Email: wycoffw_at_missouri.edu
http://chem.chem.missouri.edu/nmr/nmr.html
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Received on Wed Dec 04 2002 - 13:23:31 MST
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