Service Level Agreement

Support – Service Level Agreement (SLA)

We Care

Pericent Technologies offers an annual technical support and products upgrade contract known as “We Care”. This agreement entitles the customer to an array of support and upgrade services to ensure maximum value from their document management software. This section describes the Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Support Methodology

Customer are supported using remote support services such as the telephone, e-mail and, with customer approval, by logging on to the customers system using remote control software. Support is available from 10:30 AM to 6:30 PM IST Monday to Friday and on weekends and evenings by prior arrangement.

The support process starts when a software user contacts their internal help desk or IT support department. If the customers internal support cannot help and determines the problem is related to the document management software they will register the issue by emailing to support@pericent.com This service is available for customer’s technical support staff 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The support email is monitored by Pericent – docEdge DMS technical staff up to 16 hours per day, Monday to Friday. Technical support is generally provided during regular business hours, between 10:30 AM IST and ending at 6:30 PM IST.

Issue Severity Definitions.

Following are the levels of issue severity:

Support Response Time

All support issues registered on the document management support email receives will be responded to, by a technical support team member, by no later than noon of the next business day. In the response it will be determined if the problem is related to the document management software or a 3rd party application and a Severity level will be established.

If the source of the problem is outside the control of Pericent, the customer will be advised accordingly and best efforts will be made to notify the party / parties responsible and cooperate with them to resolve such problem.

If the problem is within the control of Pericent the following responses are made:

Level 1- Global severity: Technical e-mail communication will be initiated with the customer within 4 hours of severity determination. Continuous best efforts will be made to resolve the problem or until service is restored or until an interim remedy is implemented. The resolution objective is 1 business day.
Level 2- User severity: The source e-mail communication will be initiated with the customer within 8 hours of severity determination. Best efforts to resolve the problem will be made with a resolution objective of 3 business days.
Level 3- Non Critical severity. E-mail communication will be initiated with the customer within 16 hours of severity determination. Communication of the request will be made clear to the customers but resolution may wait until a future product release. If it is a product enhancement / future feature request the customer will be referred to Suggest Feature.

Escalation Policy

If a customer feels the support response times are not being met or the problem is not being addressed they may initiate direct contact with the VP of customer services support@pericent.com.

Customer Responsibilities

The We Care document management support program is a powerful tool but to make it work best the customer must follow normal IT practices in protecting their data. The following are a few “best practice” suggestions:

Other Features of the ‘We Care Program’

Everyone has experienced the frustration of not being able to find that piece of paper or file with the answer to that important, pending question. “IDC has estimated that the typical enterprise with 1,000 knowledge workers wastes $2.5 million to $3.5 million per year searching for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, or recreating information that can’t be found.”
(Source: IDC)
BAE Systems conducted a study that discovered that 80% of employees waste an average of half an hour per day retrieving information, while 60% are spending an hour or more duplicating the work of others. (Source: “Show me the Money, Measuring the Return on KM” Knowledge Management)

More statistics supporting the need for document management come from Coopers & Lybrand (Source: Imersion Technologies, Inc.)

90% of corporate memory exists on paper.
Of all the pages that get handled each day in the average office, 90% are merely shuffled.
The average document gets copied 19 times
Companies spend $20 in labor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document.
7.5% of all documents get lost, 3% of the remainder get misfiled.
Professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information, but up to 50% looking for it.
There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone – growing at a rate of 22% per year.

Other Features of the ‘We Care Program’

Software Upgrades

Customers on We Care have access to any hot-fixes, service packs, dot releases or major releases of software that become available while under contract. If there are no changes to the existing server or operating system the technical support for upgrades is provided at no additional charge.

Reporting

We Care maintains a status report of open and past support issues including; issue number, problem category, severity, user name, territory code, date received, status, problem description and next action description. A customer may ask for a review of their support incidences including our response at any time.

Addition of licenses

Customers on We Care can add new users to the system at any time, (a minimum of 5 users) at no administration charge other than the cost of the license. The cost of the We Care contract is pro-rated on new licensing to the master agreement anniversary date.

Terms: The We Care Agreement runs for 12 months from the day the product server software is installed (the license issued). The contract start and end date will be clearly stated on the invoice.
Termination of support services: The We Care contract may only be terminated by Pericent Technologies in advance of the contract expiry in which case Pericent will refund a prorated portion of the annual service contract. The customer may terminate by not renewing the annual contract.
Eligibility: In order to remain on We Care customers with standard version of products must remain no more than 1 release behind the most current release of products.
Server and Operating Systems Upgrades: PRIME Care does not cover the re-installation of our products as a result of customer server or operating system upgrades or catastrophic failure. There will be professional service fees for assistance in this re-installation. If these upgrades are done at the same time as a our products upgrade the charges may be reduced.