Proactive VS Reactive

It’s Friday afternoon and the day shift is about to head home for the weekend. The level transmitter has had an intermittent problem all week. Today it seemed to read the correct levels at 6am and 9am, but the problem returned at 12pm. The power to the transmitter was cycled around 1:30pm and it seems to be working properly at the end of the day. Fast forward to Saturday night – the level transmitter is acting up again, cycling the power no longer seems to fix the problem, it needs to be addressed – and now it is urgent. Aside from the possible life safety and environmental concerns, the cost and stress of addressing this issue on a Saturday night is going to be more than had it been addressed on a Tuesday morning.

How much does it cost to fix your problem right now?  

Is it the middle of the night, what support do you need?

In addition to an ICI Support Team member assisting remotely – do we need to wake up any one else?

Do we need electrician support?

Are there parts available?

What are the consequences of not fixing it till morning?

These are all questions we need to ask ourselves when we get a support request from a client. This approach is known as reactive support. We get a call, then we work with operations to solve the problem – sometimes this results in quick fix and sometimes it requires a capital project to address completely. Over the past year, the ICI Support Team has been working with clients to  transition away from reactive support to proactive services. Although we provide both to our clients, it is often cheaper and less stressful to be proactive. Proactive services, such as monitoring, alarm optimization, scheduled updates, back-ups, vulnerability tracking, and event log management help clients address issues before they get any worse. Using these services can help reduce the reactive support calls that tend to favor the times you would rather be sleeping.