Re: ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

[MacWheel99@xxxxxxx]

> When
>  you roll over a lease, do they ship you the new box and give you a
>  reasonable time period to cut over?

The last time we did this (end of 1999) the theory was that the new box was
shipped & we had a month or so to get to the new box & let them take the old
one away, but it got all screwed up.

We had help of our BP.
Save on old box, restore to new box, went very smoothly.

We may have violated the time limit on getting the old box back to IBM.
Seems to me that IBM is in no hurry to get the old box back, but this is
another opportunity to get things screwed up.

Moving IBM support from old box to new box was a disaster.
IBM sent us some humongous bills that we questioned.
Ok, I can accept some financial adjustment for them moving same support from
old box to new box, but it might have been nice had we known up front how
much to budget for the cost of transition.
Ok, I can accept finishing the payoff of an OS/400 version that we replaced
in a shorter time than when we put it on the lease based on how long we
thought we would need it for ... but why can't they SAY what this was on the
humongous bill, so we not feel like questioning each humongous bill.
What I could not accept was for these financial adjustments to turn into
annual bills sent to us in the future, that when we showed them the error of
their ways & they agreed we only had to pay them one time, that they also
canceled the coverage on the new box (no pay bill because IBM agrees it is a
mistake, so they also cancel what the original bill was for).

The following is a mixture of humor sarcasm & an idea for vendors to consider.

We need a system for auditing IBM billing & support.
Run every IBM invoice through some kind of a filter ... what the heck is this
for & is it legitimate or another IBM muck up?
Check IBM records to verify that we are still signed up for all the support
we are supposed to be getting, or has some part of it got mucked up again?
Something connected to hardware config & software licensing that says in a
manner that is accountant-friendly ... what all is it that we have on our IBM
box that is billable from IBM in terminology that is both how it will show up
on the invoices and terminology that means anything to a non-geek.

Perhaps there is an idea here for 400 vendors & open source folks to come up
with utilities for the end customer sites to be better able to cope with IBM
billing.

Scan in IBM invoices to some software.
It would tell the accounting department person WHAT THE HECK IS THIS FOR

Have a little data base built up from config & IBM billing history.
When IT installs something or removes something, up pops Q+A to record
whether this SHOULD be coming off of IBM billing or going on, and the approx
effective date, so that accounting department should be alerted to watch for
new bill or a CREDIT from IBM for what we paid ahead of time for something we
no longer have.

A later version of this utility, open source, shareware, or whatever, would
support more than IBM ... the other stuff we connect to our IBM box from
other vendors.

After IBM finds out how many customers are demanding this solution, perhaps
they will buy the license & offer it as part of a future version of OS/400.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)