ERP Support and AMC
Most annual maintenance contracts are priced as a percentage of licence value and promise nothing you can measure.
Why It Matters
A vendor subscription fixes defects in the software as shipped. It does not touch your configuration, your customisations, your integrations, your reports or your users, and that is where nearly every real ticket lands.
Four hour response sounds fast until you realise the clock stops when someone replies to say they have received your ticket. What the business cares about is when it can invoice again.
Two to three weeks reading your configuration, custom code, integrations and open issues.
Priority definitions, targets, coverage hours and included days agreed and written down.
Ticket channel, escalation path, access, runbooks and your named first line key user.
Break-fix against the SLA plus the monthly change allowance spent on agreed prioritisation.
SLA attainment, ticket taxonomy, hours used and the fixes we propose for recurring causes.
Incidents triaged to a published priority, with both response and resolution clocks running.
Workflows, approval rules, tax and pricing setup, access rights and new users as they join.
Failed syncs, stuck queues and bank or marketplace connections checked before users report them.
New reports, layout changes and management dashboards funded from the monthly allowance.
Short sessions aimed at whatever the ticket taxonomy shows people are repeatedly getting wrong.
Release testing on a copy first, so an upgrade does not become your next P1 incident.
Priority definitions, response targets, resolution targets and coverage hours, all in the contract.
A trained internal key user on first line costs you far less than paying us to answer how-to questions.
Training gaps and bad master data get named as such and fixed at the cause, not quietly billed.
A monthly allowance of days keeps the system moving with the business rather than ageing in place.
Runbooks, configuration notes and code stay current and stay yours, so leaving us is never hard.
After a paid discovery we will support a system we did not implement, on ERPNext, Odoo or SAP.
Your configuration, your customisations, your integrations, your reports and your users. That is the part a vendor product subscription does not cover, and it is where almost every real ticket lands. A contract worth paying for names the priority definitions, the response and resolution target for each priority, the coverage hours, the included change effort per month, and the report you get at the end of each month.
An annual maintenance contract commonly runs 15 to 22 percent of licence or implementation value per year. We think that number is a starting reference and not a justification on its own, so we price against the volume of tickets you actually generate and the change effort you want included. A typical mid-market retainer buys a defined number of support and change days per month, quoted as days, not as a vague percentage.
A response time is how long before a named engineer acknowledges the ticket and starts work. A resolution time is how long before the business can work again, whether by fix or by workaround. A four hour response with no resolution commitment is close to meaningless, because the clock stops the moment someone replies. We quote both for every priority, and a P1 target is stated in hours, not days.
Yes, and it is a large part of what we do. We start with a paid two to three week discovery: we read the configuration, the custom code and the integrations, list what is undocumented, and write it down. Only then do we quote an SLA, because committing to a resolution target on a system we have not read would be a guess.
You see it before it happens. The monthly report shows hours consumed against hours included, so an overrun is visible in week three rather than in an invoice. Extra effort is billed at an agreed day rate that is fixed in the contract, or it waits for next month if it is not urgent. Unused hours do not roll up forever, but we usually allow a one month carry so a quiet month is not simply lost.
Yes, and we will say so even though it reduces what you spend with us. Most mid-market organisations are well served by a hybrid: a trained internal key user handles how-to questions as first line, and genuine defects, changes and integration faults route to us. Paying a consultancy to answer questions training should have covered is the single most expensive way to buy support.
Related
The other services in this section, and related pages from TCB Infotech.
No commitment. A straight read of your current support arrangement.
