Hi, On 14/6/20 1:22 pm, Russell Coker via luv-main wrote:
On Saturday, 13 June 2020 11:21:28 PM AEST Andrew McGlashan via luv-main wrote:
Okay, well I think your customer is being unreasonable; it would be difficult to source plenty of hardware that has to come from overseas at this time for obvious reasons....
Yes it's understandable that they have difficulties. If they had said that it would take over a month to deliver when I placed the order the customer would have been a lot happier. They made an appointment to have someone install software on the server the day after it was due to be delivered and are unhappy that they had to cancel the appointment. Given the situation they were either going to be angry at Dell or at me...
Rule number one, don't make plans based on "delivery date projections", at least keep them flexible. I've seen a delivery come quite quickly whilst another being delayed for a long time with the newer order coming before the older one. This is just in AU with no consideration, as I understand, of overseas supply delaying anything. This is a problem of the "Just In Time" economy and expectations that are crazy and only work when everything is 100% normal and fail quickly when there is any problem at any point in the supply chain for whatever reason. There was a small piece on LandLine recently about a farmer whom had to import spare parts to make sure he could have them on hand when the pandemic was in it's early stages. Having not done so could have cost him serious monies as the JIT supply chain is and has been a real problem. That farmer is good for a period of time, but perhaps not long enough.
Having said that, perhaps a second hand unit from eBay might get them out of trouble and perhaps save them some money at the same time.
The money is already spent. But that's a reasonable point, Grays Online has a lot of server gear and are very good with rapid shipping. Next time a client needs a server I'll check if Grays has any auctions coming up for suitable server gear.
When you rely upon third party supply chains, and let's face it, unless you have plenty of spare money to tie up in hardware, that's what you are going to have to do.... I wouldn't be so sure of Grays either, unless you can pickup locally from stock that is immediately available. A.