Has Anyone Sued Their Digital Press Manufacturer for Downtime?

[NTXSOL]

The funny thing about our current situation is even Xerox admits that those who help the customer the least are the ones who get promoted. Our previous Field Manager who manages all of our service tech's was horrible and they all knew it. We now have a new manager because she was promoted within Xerox. Now we have dealt with her boss who made an appointment with us and made promises out of his a**. He had an analyst with him and we scheduled the analyst to come out. They agreed if they couldn't fix the problem they would replace the unit. That was 2 months ago and the machine has been down these 2 months. The analyst initially backed out of our original date saying he couldnt meet with us anymore because he had to do an install at a larger company with 2 igens and we weren't as important. He wanted to reschedule for a week later. When we called the manager to discuss this with him he had no idea the analyst wasn't at our shop that day because he never bothered to follow up again. Xerox is horrible ( and this goes for everybody we have dealt with. We have had 3 different sales rep's and service technicians and managers) at returning or answering phone calls. They never follow up on our issues. We requested that it be noted that we wished to never have a specific tech at our location and he had bothered us enough that we thought about taking legal action against him. They promised us it would be noted on his record and that he would never show up again. Two weeks later he showed up at our doorstep and still managed to be a complete a**hole. When we called Xerox they told us they made a mistake and nothing had been noted on his record. We are still down. Now that we are doing close to 75k clicks a month they are wanting to keep our business all of the sudden. It will be funny when it comes time to buy an iGen and we end up with a couple of Indigo's or MGI Meteor DP60s. They have definitely lost our future business because they rely on their business model to keep customers coming back. They fail to remember that they have to live up to their service guarantee's and that if their machines do not work that nothing else matters.

I understand that certain people will always have problems that they can't get resolved. Unfortunately we would be fools to let Xerox burn us again. We have purchased a second machine on the open market because they couldnt fix our first machine and the only person trying to contact us from Xerox is still trying to sell us a machine. They have slowed their process of putting the machine in our name almost trying to force us to buy a machine through their used certified program. We have had a machine delivered and installed in our shop now for 2 weeks and we can't use it because they are taking forever to get the machine into our name and under our customer #. We can't even get the machine inspected in the meantime due to their backward workflow. Now if the machine doesn't meet the requirements to go under a service contract we will have wasted 2 weeks and will have to return the machine to the person from whom we are purchasing from. Seems to me that they should be able to inspect before placing the machine in our name.... but i guess thats the way xerox works.

We do however have legal documents drawn up and logs of our own for our downtime. We do not plan to go away quietly. They have almost ran our small company into the ground. They have told us that small companies obviously come second to them and that if their tech gets an emergency call on an igen even though we had been down for months prior to setting up our meeting that we are second place. I would definitely warn any small company that is told by xerox that a used machine is the way to go to be very very careful. If the machine doesn't work very well they will blame you for buying a used machine even though they certified it.

That is all for my Quick Reply.

[Printservedigital]

"Their technicians have a lot of trouble resolving problems for known hardware issues. Too many managers are completely ineffective and some could care less........down time just doesn't matter."

RE Kodak.

Here in the UK I've worked with some of their techs and I have to say I haven't been impressed. Their technical knowledge has been lacking somewhat on some CTP and one of the techs even fabricated what I had said, to my boss, in an attempt to subvert the standard course of production claiming I had said we weren't putting their product on press when in fact I had never said such a thing and the product we had produced was in fact being mounted.

Luckily for them their plate product was very good and I suspect the company I worked for at the time have since used them as a bargaining option to drive down their own plate prices with their current supplier.

[Slammer]

Ahh the age-old debate:
The discrepancy between what the customer wanted, what the sales guy sold and reality land in the installed product.

[jbeniston]

I don't know about any manufacturer who's has been sued, but I hate to hear about someone's business being destroyed by rubbish service. You would think that in this business environment they would be hell bent on servicing the heck out of their customers.
I'm an Offset guy but I have been in shops with multiple HP digital machines. They apparently were all rented from HP, why don't you find out if you can make a deal with them and save your business. From what I could see they were swift to react to a problem and the service guys seemed to be really good.
Best of luck to you

[NTXSOL]

Our problem isn't the service. We have had a guy out here daily at our shop. The problem is that their contract says if they can't fix it they will replace it. We are just wondering how long we are supposed to wait before the machine gets replaced.

[Happyprinter]

Dont hold your breath.

[Julio]

I hope Xerox finally steps up to the plate to resolve the problems. Fortunately, our manager and service techs are very good.

Unfortunately, too many of the prinergy and trendsetter techs 'work' on the problem - they don't actually 'solve' the problem. How is this acceptable to Kodak, especially when it turns out to be a known issue?

Preps and Prinergy techs are one and the same. Their call center has 'worked' on this Preps problem for 3 months, and a manager is involved:
Dongle Problem - Page 2 - GUA Forums

Kodak was contacted but failed to keep the presses printing:
CTP problem no-one in the World can fix. Any takers?

Kodak needs to do something about this kind of poor support for Creo equipment.

[NTXSOL]

Ahhhh......... it feels good. We will see how much better our new like-for-like printer really is but it can't be worse than the machine we have had. It only took us a year to get this one replaced and about 8 months of that as actual down time but now its nice to know that we don't have to move a broken machine into our new facility

[Craig]

With the exception of 1 post, has anyone else noticed the lack of presence by those representing manufactures/dealers? It's funny how they are the first to jump on the topic and blow about how good they are but when they are getting slammed (rightfully so) for piss poor service/equipment they mysteriously disappear???

Quite a pattern they are developing

[printgirl]

Have you had success doing your own service?