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I have a customer who has a 240WD wide format. The one with Plotbase. The problem is their Plotbase server is screwed up. Need to reinstall Plotbase, possibly XP OS as well. I want to upgrade them, but they bought their wide format about 6 years ago and paid cash. Price to repair plotbase is probably well under 2K. New system is 15K. How do I deliver 13K worth of benefits?

How long should we be expected to support Plotbase?

Anyone have any experience with this?
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What type of user is it and how heavy is their usage???? Do they have a service contract with you to cover that Plotbase server? Did you offer them a contract on the server?

You may be able to sell them on the benefits of the scan to folder capabilities and the fact that the new model no longer needs that extra PC running Plotbase.

Beyond that I'd say get another PC and reload plotbase but they need to be aware that the technology is moving forward and plotbase will not be supported forever. 6 years old is pretty old.
quote:
Originally posted by jswinberlin:
I have a customer who has a 240WD wide format. The one with Plotbase. The problem is their Plotbase server is screwed up. Need to reinstall Plotbase, possibly XP OS as well. I want to upgrade them, but they bought their wide format about 6 years ago and paid cash. Price to repair plotbase is probably well under 2K. New system is 15K. How do I deliver 13K worth of benefits?

How long should we be expected to support Plotbase?

Anyone have any experience with this?


I have situations like this before, even though the 240W is only six years old, keep in mind they were around for almost 4 years! Ricoh has now listed them as "limited parts" or something to that effect. This is the first item I would tell them about.

There has got be advantages moveing to the W3601 for them.

Are they scanning if so, are they only scanning as a .tiff. Are they emailing the scans as .tiffs or are they converting to .pdf, if they are converting to .pdf, have they considered the time it takes to convert each file?

Are the outsouring color scans? If so this can be brought in house and reap the savings.

XP Windows, I'm thinking is no longer supported? You may want to add this, and then ask how much money they've spent to support the existing plotbase server/software over the years. Sooner or later the hard drive is going to crash.

You need to charge list for the upgrade of plotbase, no discounts and add professional hours to install, test and train. So if you come out with $2,000, this pay for the first 78 months of the new lease, why throw good money into and old solution?

There's got to be a time savings for scanning also, ask them how many times they scan a month and in most cases they are moving the files, find out how much time this is taking them. By moving to scan2folder it could free up a couple of hours per month.

Better yet, figure out the price with global scan and see if they get excited about being able to scan to a nested folder from the W3601, or even talk about the new systems have the ability to scan2cloud (use dropbox free service).

Point is you need to dig sdeep and see how much time they are spending for scanning, printing, copying and see how much time they can save and then associate a cost per hour and how many hours per month and then couple that with the expense of the new plotbase software.

Do they have a maintenance agreement? If not they will also have the cost of the major PM. You need to add all of the scenarios together to come up with a viable savings break it down monthly even though the customer may want to purchase. I foud many cleints that bought the first time and then leased the second time, maybe go with a $1.00 purchase option.

Dig deep!

Art

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