Support Policy

Minnovation support is offered under the product name “AlphaCare” and is available for all AlphaX branded products.

3rd Party Products may be included in an Xcare Plan at the discretion on Minnovation.

Introduction

At Minnovation, we pride ourselves on providing the best support experience that we can deliver. Our support team routinely helps to troubleshoot problems, provide advice on best practices, and keeps projects moving forward.

We have chosen not to impose arbitrary limits on our support; that’s why we don’t hinder use of our support through restrictive contracts. We do not apply hard limits on the number of tickets you can create, phone calls you can make, or the amount of time we’ll spend helping you.

However, our support team is not infinite. As support is a limited resource, we must work together and apply fair use rules to help prevent abuse of the system in order to keep wait times down and provide fair use to support resources.

Minnovation reserves the right to alter this support policy at any time.

Fair Use Guidelines

In order to remain in good standing as a member of our support community, it is important to acknowledge the fair use guidelines outlined below.

Support is not training

We offer many different types of training and educational resources. Our online knowledge base and user manual is an excellent reference for information.

While our support staff will often offer tips and advice in the course of troubleshooting, we, unfortunately, cannot offer ongoing consultative training as part of a normal support plan. Please make use of our other educational offerings, or engage for consultative training in order to learn how to use our product.

Designing your system is out of scope for support

While our support team is happy to help you when you encounter a technical problem and provide expert advice if you get stuck, their role is not to provide system design or implementation guidance, or consulting of any kind.

If you need significant help designing or implementing your project, please consider getting in touch with:

• An AlphaX qualified system integrator, who are experts in AlphaX and many other related technologies.
• Our Sales Engineering team is also available for those looking for guidance on building out advanced architectures and want some information on best practices before making a purchase.

Know your infrastructure

AlphaX can be accessed through many different types of internet connections and web browsers, and provides a fabric to connect various sensors, field devices, databases, and other systems.

Our support staff are experienced with the AlphaX fabric in many different kinds of architectures and configurations and will happy to assist in troubleshooting many different kinds of problems, but the scope of our support is limited to AlphaX itself.

Troubleshooting or configuring external systems like databases, firewalls, load balancers, networking devices, virtualisation, cloud infrastructure, etc., is outside the scope of our support.

Have your experts available

When creating a support ticket, it is important to have experts on your systems available. We try to make our support experience interactive where possible, where we will help troubleshoot live on your system if possible.
In order to expedite the process, make sure you can make the experts in your system available to aid the troubleshooting process so that nothing is a “black box.”

Abuse will not be tolerated

We understand that many situations that require support are stressful, high-pressure, time-sensitive, costly, and intense. That said, we take any kind of abuse to our support team very seriously.

We will take immediate action against anyone who uses aggressive or harsh language, threatens, demeans, or otherwise engages in unprofessional behaviour towards Minnovation employees.

Fair Use Monitoring

In order to ensure that support remains as available as possible, we take care to monitor tickets for potential violation of the above-mentioned principles.

To do this, we track a wide range of metrics and will work with customers who are routinely failing to follow the guidelines.

As a result, we may send you usage updates from time to time, give you a gentle reminder, or, in severe cases, be forced to de-prioritize your tickets in the support queue.

In extreme circumstances, we reserve the right to suspend or terminate access to support for any individual that is violating the above guidelines.

Support Model

The main goal of Minnovation support team is to provide prompt, high-quality support to customers who are experiencing serious problems with AlphaX products.

For this reason, tickets are prioritised according to severity and prioritised in an order that’s determined by the level of support that customers have chosen and covers the products in question.

‼️ Note: issues that cause downtime and/or loss of service are actioned immediately regardless of support plan and are subject to our Service Level Agreement.

Ticket Classification

As tickets are received they are individually classified as either Software or Infrastructure and allocated to unique support pipelines. Each of these pipelines have a seperate resource allocation and specialist technicians available to resolve issues.

Ticket Severity

Along with the classification structure, we also use ticket severity to help determine how tickets are prioritised within the relevant support queue. There are four levels of ticket severity which all incoming support tickets are assigned.

• Urgent – This is a reserved priority for issues directly affecting service level agreements with all customers.
• High – Complete loss of services not affecting service level agreement. High levels of data discrepancies. Data aggregator, gateway or API offline (Hardware).
• Medium – Partial loss of services not affecting service level agreement. Intermittent data discrepancies. Intermittent service from data aggregator, gateway or API (Hardware). Critical Field device and sensors offline.
• Low – Improvements and upgrades for non-critical services. Service improvements and or upgrades for data aggregators, gateways or API’s (Hardware). Non-Critical Field device and sensors offline.

Low – Improvements and upgrades for non-critical services. Service improvements and or upgrades for data aggregators, gateways or API’s (Hardware). Non-Critical Field device and sensors offline.
The assignment of severity to tickets occurs during the first communication with Minnovation Support at the time of ticket submission when submitted by phone. If a ticket is submitted via the web portal, we will attempt to assign an accurate severity based on the supplied information.

How Prioritisation Occurs

Tickets are prioritised within the support system by taking into account

• Ticket Severity;
• Support Plan in Place; and
• Time ticket has been in pipeline;

Tickets are then sorted into a queue to be actively handled by the support team.

In general, tickets submitted by accounts having a “higher” support plan type will be serviced first in a like for like scenario; however, plan type is not the only factor used to determine response priority; impact and wait times are also taken into account in the ordering of the ticket queue.

Pricing

Support plans are calculated per calendar year and paid a year in advance pro-rata, rounded to the start of the calendar month in high the support contract takes effect

Pricing is based on the total retail cost of the hardware and/or software.

Customers can choose a single level of care only, however flexibility exists to choose which products are covered by the AlphaCare service at the discretion of Minnovation.

Lapses in Support

If a lapse in support occurs greater than 12 months, you will be charged a reinstatement admin fee of 10% of one calendar years support fees. You may also be required to pay the previous number of months that would make the support continuous.

i.e should you miss 3 months fees, you need to pay the previous 3 months, plus the pro-rata amount of 9 months to make up a full years support plan.

Extended warranties will be forfeited in the event of any lapses in support at Minnovations discretion.

AlphaCare Plans

Priority Care

Priority Care is our premium support offering access to a dedicated engineer for your account, providing unlimited phone, and web support at our highest priority level, as well as free software upgrades and training discounts.

+ 30% Annually | Support plan price is based on the retail price of hardware & software at the time of purchase.

Priority Care includes:

• Extended Hardware Warranty for Life of Support (Maximum of 5 Years)
• Dedicated Engineer, unlimited phone, web portal support provided at our highest priority level. (Includes phone support during business hours; priority level may be affected by the severity of the issue.)
• Upgrade Protection: Unlimited free upgrades for any software revisions to products under your support plan.
• 10% discounts on training courses
• $80/Hour On Site Support Costs (Issues outside of Warranty)

NOTE: To qualify for Priority Care, your support spend must be $6,000 or more in a calendar year.

Total Care

Get peace of mind for the entire year with unlimited phone, and web portal access to our technical support reps, free software & firmware upgrades each year, and member discounts.

+ 25% Annually | Support plan price is based on the retail price of hardware & software at the time of purchase.

Total Care includes:

• Extended Hardware Warranty for Life of Support (Maximum of 3 Years)
• Unlimited phone (during business hours), and web portal support
• Upgrade Protection: One free upgrade for any software revisions to products under your support plan per calendar year.
• 5% off training courses
• $120/Hour On Site Support Costs (Issues outside of Warranty)

To qualify for Total Care, your support spend must be $3,000 or more in a calendar year.

Basic Care

Best for customers who want access to technical support reps via the web portal and email, but don’t require that issues be expedited via phone support. Includes 50% discounts to any modules purchased and firmware updates every.

+ 20% Annually | Support plan price is based on the retail price of hardware & software at the time of purchase.

Basic Care includes:

• 50% discount upgrade for any software revisions to products under your support plan per year.
• Unlimited web portal support.
• $160/Hour On Site Support Costs

To qualify for Basic Care, your support spend must be $1,500 or more in a calendar year.

No Care

Should a support packages lapse, or should a customer opt-out of support at any time, support requests can still be handled at the standard hourly rates.

• $185/hr On Site Support Costs
• $120/hr Help Desk Charges

Upgrades

Upgrades are free for products under a Priority Care and Total Care support plan and comes at 50% discount for Basic Care. If an upgrade is needed to provide support resolution and a support plan is not in place, customers will have to pay for the full retail price for the upgrade.

Support Channels

Telephone Support

Technical support via telephone is available for products under a Priority or Total Care plan. Our telephone support is often enhanced by the use of TeamViewer, which lets our representatives actually see your issue live over the Internet, reducing incident resolution times to a minimum.

The support department can be reached by calling 1300 916 082 during our normal support hours of 8 AM to 5 PM AEST.

When calling after hours, you will be given the option to be redirected to the emergency support line. After-hours support is available 24x7x365 for customers who are eligible for phone support and is billed at $350 per hour with a one-hour minimum.

Email Support

Technical support via email is available for all products under a paid Xcare plan. Email provides the advantage of being able to attach screenshots and files to accelerate the support process.

Post-Sales Support

Each product purchase comes with 90 days of free telephone technical support. After the initial free period, telephone support is available with the purchase of a paid Xcare plan. If Xcare is purchased during this time frame, then it is valid for 12 months starting from the day the complimentary period ends.

Minnovation Technologies will also provide limited telephone technical support for prospective customers.

Electronic Support (Web)

Minnovation is proud to offer free electronic product support via our knowledge base.

Extended Warranty

Extended Warranty is offered to all customers on Priority Care and Total Care support packages. Extended warranty covers all hardware failures in the extended time period that are covered under the standard warranty conditions.

3rd Party supplied hardware is not eligible for extended warranty.

Priority Care extends the standard 1 year warranty for up to 3 years beyond the initial purchase date.

Total Care extends the standard 1 year warranty for up to 2 years beyond the initial purchase date.