1. Remote Support Via The Internet For All Clients

When you’re having trouble on your assembly line, are you willing to wait until the providers can schedule one of their few engineers to fly out to your facility to troubleshoot your system? Are you prepared to foot the bill for airfare, hotels, meals, and hourly fees involved with the engineer’s travel requirements? Certainly, there are some instances when an engineer has to travel; ECI is no exception here. But there are probably just as many instances where he could get the job done with remote access via the internet, saving you thousands of dollars each time.

In the top right of this page you’ll notice a “Support Session” icon. ECI customers can securely log in for a one-to-one support session with an ECI engineer, who will be able to “see” exactly what you see on your screen, remotely navigate through your file structure, determine the root cause in most instances, and fix your problem. All without leaving his office.

We can hardly stress enough what a value this service is for you. It will save you time (and time is money). It will save you travel costs. It will save you scheduling headaches. It will streamline custom programming requests. And it will maximize your uptime and line efficiency.

2. Included On-Site Start Up Assistance

Have you ever received a quote and thought it was the best deal, only to find out that they had a bunch of hidden charges and fees that jacked up the price after you committed to the project? That’s not fair, but it happens all the time to unsuspecting technology buyers.

At ECI we take the quoting process very seriously. We don’t loosely throw around “budgetary numbers.” If it’s a custom job that we don’t have a clear precedent for, our Account Executives are not even permitted to send a quote without first gathering the necessary information and scheduling a conference call with a qualified ECI engineer to get a crystal clear understanding of your precise needs. It’s more work for us, but this enables ECI to always offer a No-Surprises quote our customers can hold us to.

Once you’ve budgeted for a project with ECI, we never want you to have to ask for additional money to cover hidden costs like start-up assistance, travel costs, and warranties. That’s why we have always included our SwitchOn™ support and training as part of your investment. You aren’t purchasing a block of time. We come in, switch on the IPCS, and stay for production. And here’s the ECI difference—we stay until you tell us to go home. We also train your operators, technicians, and engineers at the time of start-up at no additional charge and include (in writing) a lifetime software warranty.

3. Lifetime Software Warranty

First of all, before you even begin talking about software warranty, you need to set this one thing straight. For an industrial manufacturing application, the need for bulletproof software is absolutely critical. Downtime is not acceptable.

When evaluating a provider you need to ask them how their software has been tested in real-life, and to what degree. If you’re one of the first few installations, brace yourself for playing the role of guinea pig. There will be bugs. There will be glitches. Bank on it. Bugs and endless revision numbers are an unavoidable reality for EVERY software developer from Microsoft® to Nintendo®. With industrial software systems of this complexity, there are many variables to consider: network speed and traffic, multiple operating systems, hardware compatibility, conflicting drivers, power surge protection, data back up, etc. Each assembly line has its own unique array of challenges, making it virtually impossible to anticipate every imaginable scenario.

680 (and counting) installations have afforded ECI the opportunity to thoroughly debug and enhance the performance of our proprietary software. And since we have always offered a lifetime software warranty, our customers haven’t paid us a dime for hundreds of revisions we’ve made in our 20 years of development. Of course, our earliest customers (ECI’s beta testers, if you will) have benefited most from this warranty. You probably will never even have to cash in on it. If you do find an anomaly, it won’t be a show stopper, and usually it can be handled over the telephone or through our internet support option, which allows us to access PC’s on your plant-floor.

Our lifetime software warranty is provided in writing with every quote we send out. Simply put, if you find a bug, we’ll fix it for free. For life.

E-mail us about your plant's needs,
or call 901-854-2123.