Slashdot Mirror
Equipment Suppliers You Can Trust?
Steve Gray asks: "It has happened to all of us at some time or another. You're two weeks from deploying an application, but suddenly your testbed server falls over, and just won't get back up. After fighting with a variety of companies to try and get parts delivered for Tuesday, I'm finding that most companies will stall your order for days for reasons from random extra checks through to migration of lesser known species of Vole, business needs be damned! Who do Slashdot readers turn to when technology goes wrong? Do you trust them to deliver by tommorow, without fail?"
Agreed. It's foolish to try to run a shop without spare parts on hand, especially for anything remotely critical. Time and experience has taught me over and over, that if you are not prepared, it will be made known to those who you'd rather it not be made known to.
What that overnight shipping costs on some parts would pay for the part itself. Keep spares on hand.
- Eric
I no longer work in the tech industry, but as a master distributor of industrial parts, we stock as best as we can and deliver overnight on request, but our users have to realize that we only stock what we sell regularly. I'm not going to stock a part that I sell once a year. The user has to take some responsibility and know what kind of down time he can afford and what the risk is of a part going down. We do our best to get stuff overnighted from the factories when necessary, but it's not always possible. The end user can only blame to the supplier to a certain extent, and then when a supplier can't get the parts to you, you look for an expensive, but fast solution. If not, you're stuck. There's no way around it. Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.