- Client Support Overview
Standard Software Product Support
and Maintenance
Revision F
July 5, 2016
- NOTICE -
The information contained in this document is subject to change without notice. Every effort has been made to supply complete and accurate information. However, Cimetrix, Inc. makes no warranty of any kind with regard to this document, including, but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. Cimetrix shall not be liable for errors contained herein or direct, indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages in connection with the furnishing, performance, or use of this document.
Copyright ©, 2001-2019, Cimetrix, Incorporated.
This document is the property of Cimetrix, Inc. and is protected by copyright. The information contained herein is proprietary and may not be copied, transferred, or disclosed to others without prior written authorization from Cimetrix, Inc., Salt Lake City, Utah.
Cimetrix is a registered trademark. CIMPortal, CIMConnect, SECSConnect, TESTConnect, CIM300, CIMControlFramework, Cimetrix EquipmentTest, Cimetrix HostConnect, and Cimetrix Sapience, CIMFoundation, CIM40-Process Job, CIM87-Carrier Management, CIM90-Substrate Tracking, CIM94-Control Job, CIM58-ARAMS, CIM116-Equipment Performance Tracking, CIM148- E148 Time Synchronization and Definition of the TS-Clock Object, and E157- Module Process Tracking are trademarks of Cimetrix, Inc. All other registered trademarks and trademarks are properties of their respective holders.
Table of Contents
1 Passionate Support
2 Standard Product Support and Maintenance
3 Incident Response and Resolution
4 Software Releases
5 Cimetrix Product Maintenance Policy
6 Customer Satisfaction
1 Passionate Support
Cimetrix prides itself in providing the highest level of support in the industry. Our Company mission is to provide “Passionate Support” for every product and solution offered by Cimetrix. We devote our experienced software engineering resources to help our customers more effectively develop, deploy, and support their factory automation and tool control solutions. Cimetrix has over 20 years of experience supporting our Customers’ software engineering and support teams with our products installed in thousands of systems worldwide.
Our Quality Customer Support (QCS) department is a team of skilled software engineers that provide technical support and implement the product changes for a variety of software issues to help ensure our customers’ success.
Cimetrix Quality Customer Support Mission
Ensuring our Customers’ Success through Global Operational Excellence.
Our philosophy is to achieve customer satisfaction, success, and loyalty by focusing on what is important for successful deployment and production operation in the fab. Cimetrix holds excellence, integrity, and our customers in the highest value and drives all efforts by these benchmarks for success.
2 Standard Product Support and Maintenance
Cimetrix Standard Product Support and Maintenance is a family of affordable, prepackaged support services to assist your software team address issues efficiently and keep them focused on the development of your products. Our standard offering entitles you to receive unlimited support incidents for the supported products.
Cimetrix strives to keep our active products current with relevant operating systems, development tools, and applicable industry standards. Cimetrix develops product roadmaps that allow us to plan product improvements that incorporate and leverage advancements in supporting technologies and standards. Our standard package entitles you to receive free upgrades for all new versions of the supported products that Cimetrix releases during the term of your contract.
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Feature |
Benefit |
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Unlike many other software suppliers, Cimetrix does not have any limit to the number of incidents customers can submit or the number of customer contacts authorized to submit incident reports or receive software updates. |
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Cimetrix’s web site at www.cimetrix.com contains a password protected support area for our customers. This secure area allows access to technical documentation, sample applications and a convenient way to correspond with our engineers. |
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All new versions of products that Cimetrix releases will be available for download through your secure web account. This includes Patch Releases containing important defect corrections as well as Service Releases including valuable new features. |
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Your incident will be assigned to a software engineer and you will receive a response within 1 business day. |
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Critical production issues are automatically escalated to the highest priority and an Emergency Release or Patch Release may be provided to the customer to delivery critical repairs. |
Customers may open incidents with Cimetrix Technical Support through e-mail, phone, or the Cimetrix support page on our web site. Incidents are assigned directly to Cimetrix technical QCS engineers for investigation and resolution, according to engineer skill sets and availability. With a focus on fab production support, resources are prioritized for maximum response to issues occurring in production environments to minimize costly production downtime.
Software support and maintenance services will be performed at our offices. On-site support and other travel are available at the customers’ request. Such services will be the financial responsibility of the customer as a separate expense or included as part of a Custom Software Support Agreement.
Contacting Support
Standard business hours for Cimetrix Quality Customer Support are 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, U.S. Mountain Time, Monday through Friday, excluding U.S. holidays.
- Telephone: 801-256-6501
- Email: support@cimetrix.com
- Web: www.cimetrix.com
3 Incident Response and Resolution
Cimetrix Technical Support is structured to handle your requests in a fast and efficient manner. Whether you are calling with general questions about the use of the product or you have technical problems that you need resolved in a timely manner, we have the team in place to expedite your request.
Passionate support means taking ownership of a problem and executing proactive measures to effectively and efficiently resolve the problem no matter how big or small. QCS engineers have full accountability for the resolution of an assigned incident, acting as the customer's single point of contact and coordinating the efforts of Cimetrix resources. This significantly reduces the time-to-resolution for critical issues.
QCS software engineers are responsible for:
- Opening / Updating support incident records
- Taking complete ownership of all technical issues
- Categorizing the Software Change Request (SCR) to be either an enhancement or a low-priority defect and working with the management to schedule for a future release date
QCS can also draw on other Cimetrix engineering or R&D resources to effectively and efficiently resolve issues. Working together as a team is a critical ingredient for customer success.
Assigning a Priority to a Problem
Incoming incidents are evaluated for Priority and derived from the customer’s view of the criticality of the problem. The Priority defines time-to-resolution goals and escalation potential. The following chart contains the definitions Cimetrix uses to assign a Priority level to your problem. Priority A issues are treated with utmost attention.
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Priority Level |
Condition / Impact |
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Priority A CRITICAL |
An incident that results in a critical business impact. This may be assigned to an Incident where the customer experiences a complete or substantial loss of service when using a Production System, or the issue is severely impacting a ‘go-live’ date. A Priority “A” Incident represents a serious recurring problem that inhibits or interrupts processing of production materials and for which no reasonable Workaround is known or available. This priority classification is primarily based upon the ability to operate the system in an automated mode. If the reported problem completely disrupts the automated operation capability such that it inhibits or interrupts processing of production materials, even if manual operation is unaffected, then the Incident may automatically be classified as Priority “A.” Customer Critical Incidents. The Customer may request that Cimetrix escalate any critical Incident, regardless of the nature of the Incident or impact and request that Cimetrix prioritize that Incident as Priority “A.” Cimetrix will make reasonable efforts to accommodate such requests and respond to the Incident accordingly. |
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Priority B IMPORTANT |
An incident that results in some business impact for a Production System or Development System. This may be assigned to an incident where the customer experiences a situation where (i) the functionality of the software is adversely affected, but can be circumvented, (ii) certain functions within the software are disabled, but the software remains operable, or (iii) a complete or substantial loss of service occurs when using a Development System. A Priority “B” Incident represents an inconvenience to the user, but does not affect processing of production materials or for which a reasonably acceptable Workaround is available. |
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Priority C LOW PRIORITY |
An incident that results in a minimal business impact for a Production System or Development System. This may be assigned to an incident where the customer experiences no loss of service and the incident has no significant effect on the usability of the software. This level is typically used for questions, comments, documentation errors, and low priority product enhancement requests. A Priority “C” Incident represents a low priority Incident that results in inconvenience but that can be accommodated without affecting functionality. |
Scope of Incoming Requests
Cimetrix QCS will provide technical support for the following types of incidents:
- Installation issues
- Documentation issues
- Licensing issues
- Issues with the Cimetrix website
- General introductory-level training on how to use Cimetrix products
- General advice concerning architecture and design of solutions
- Review of plans for architecture or deployment
- Capacity or performance planning
- Verification that Cimetrix products are working according to specifications
- Confirmation of apparent defects and submission of any Software Change Requests
- Information concerning patches
- Product feature requests and other Software Change Requests
The Cimetrix QCS team will be limited in the extent of support we can provide for:
- Debugging of functionality of custom-authored code
- General configuration questions for non-Cimetrix software (e.g. operating system, database, third party applications)
- Requests to create custom solutions or customized sample applications (includes debugging of custom authored solutions)
- Compatibility issues with non-supported technologies
If you need assistance with these types of issues, our Global Services team is available to assist you by defining a separately funded project.
When reporting a problem, prior to contacting Cimetrix you should:
Define the problem
It is very important that you be as specific as possible in explaining a problem or question to our QCS engineer, so they can provide you with the best solution. Being able to answer the following questions will help us resolve your software problem as efficiently as possible:
- Is the problem occurring in a fab production environment? If so, does this problem occur in your development environment as well?
- What versions of the product software were you running when the problem occurred?
- What version of the Microsoft operating system were you running? Please include any Microsoft Service Pack information.
- Has the problem happened before, or is this an isolated incident?
- What steps led to the failure? For our Connectivity Products, a sequence of messages sent and received leading up to the failure can be helpful.
- Have any changes (hardware or software) been made to the system?
- Were error messages or other diagnostic information produced in the product logs? If yes, what were they?
Gather relevant diagnostic information
It is often necessary for our Technical Support Engineers to analyze specific diagnostic information (i.e. log files, traces, error messages, etc.) to resolve your problem. Gathering this information often is the most critical step in resolving the problem. Product-specific documentation can be very helpful in identifying what is required to resolve the issue. If you are unsure about what documentation is required, you can contact Customer Support for help to gather the necessary diagnostic information.
Incident Handling
When you call Cimetrix customer support, your call is routed to the first available QCS engineer. The engineer will ask you some basic questions about the nature of your request. The engineer will create a unique Incident record for your call in our tracking database. You will be given an Incident ID for use on any future calls regarding the same issue.
Once your incident is recorded, it is researched, resolved, or escalated as appropriate. Due to the level of specialization required to maintain superior technical expertise at the team level, it is sometimes necessary to involve more than one individual when resolving a particular problem.
While working with you to resolve your issue, Cimetrix may need to access information on your system relative to the failure or may need to recreate the failure to get additional information. Should the problem be related to your system’s unique application and configuration, you may be asked to attempt to recreate the problem to obtain the required information.
If you and the Cimetrix QCS engineer agree, you may decide to send your problem information or log files to Cimetrix electronically for analysis. When considering electronic submission, data size, and information security become important considerations. The Cimetrix technical support engineer working with you can help you determine what is best and help you set up the transfer.
Note: Cimetrix treats any customer proprietary information that we receive as highly confidential and is used only to help us resolve your problem. A nondisclosure agreement can be signed if necessary. Upon problem resolution, all submitted materials are deleted, if requested. All information about Cimetrix products and any suggestions from customers for improvements or corrections to Cimetrix products will be owned by Cimetrix.
Cimetrix will provide a response from a QCS engineer within 1 business day. In some cases, our initial response may be a request for additional information or a request for additional time to continue our investigation. Incident resolution times vary depending on nature of the incident, but the Cimetrix QCS team is dedicated to your success and will continue to work diligently until the problem is resolved.
We take every incident seriously – no matter how trivial the request may seem - even answering a simple question about software versions. Due to the complexity of equipment automation software, thorough research and analysis is required before any response can be provided. On-going discussions (either verbally or electronically) may also be necessary between the support engineer and user to properly communicate the details of the incident and response. Sometimes, the initial response is not the final resolution and further discussion and analysis is required.
In general, QCS engineers will perform the following steps to quickly identify a solution to your problem:
1. If the support incident is simply a question about the use of Cimetrix products, Cimetrix will perform the required investigation to collect the necessary information and provide their findings to the customer along with examples if necessary. In many cases, support incidents can be resolved through customer education.
2. If the support incident is a problem report, then QCS engineers will try to collect additional information from the customer about the nature and urgency of the problem. Problems occurring in a production environment receive Priority “A” status.
3. The QCS team will perform a preliminary analysis of a problem report to attempt to identify any obvious cause(s). This includes:
- Errors that are expected as a result of an abnormal operational scenario. For example, an error response for a request with invalid parameters.
- Failures resulting from known product limitations or defects.
- Common implementation or user errors.
As part of these preliminary steps, the QCS engineer may develop a sample application or provide sample application source code that the customer can use to verify that Cimetrix has properly understood the scenario and that the product is working properly, in a general case. QCS will then ask the customer to provide additional information or to make modification to the sample to demonstrate the problem.
4. The objective of the initial stages of the process is to attempt to resolve the problem using the resources immediately available to the engineer. If the cause of the problem is not obvious or easily determined with some preliminary analysis of the available information, then the QCS team will try to reproduce the problem at Cimetrix by attempting to duplicate the customer’s environment and operational scenario. Alternatively, we will work closely with the customer to try to reproduce the problem in their development environment and collect all of the step-by-step details and other relevant information to diagnose the problem. There are several benefits to this approach:
Being able to effectively demonstrate the problem ensures that we correctly understand the operational scenario, the problem symptom, and its impact.- Having an environment in which the problem can be reproduced allows us to add debugging and diagnostic tools to the environment to “trap” all of the details about the problem when it occurs and to diagnose the cause immediately.
- The application environment which readily demonstrates the problem is a perfect test bed for any repairs that may be implemented in the product or the customer’s application. Without this, there is a lower confidence that any such repairs have permanently resolved the problem.
In almost all cases, this is the quickest and most cost-effective resolution path. However, sometimes, it is difficult to reproduce the problem because the problem does not happen very often; it occurs only in a very specific environment or very little is known about the operational scenario. The QCS team employs many different methods to try to find the cause of a problem and does not solely depend on the problem being reproduced at Cimetrix.
5. The QCS team may also perform a source code review for the Cimetrix products to look for possible causes of the error. In a case where there is an error message produced in a product log, for example, it is often easy to discover the cause through a source code review simply by looking for the places in the code that produce that particular error message. There are other types of errors, however, that are not easily diagnosed by looking at source code. The QCS team may also ask to review the customer’s application source code to look for possible causes of the failure in the specific implementation.
At this stage, Cimetrix may also perform experiments by running multiple tests and developing applications that simulate different scenarios that may cause the reported behavior. The QCS team may also request that the customer perform experiments or make changes to the application to try different solution alternatives.
6. Cimetrix will continue to work to resolve the issue remotely from our offices. Cimetrix engineers can be available to travel to the customer’s site and/or to a production site to resolve critical issues. This is sometimes the quickest path to a solution in the case where Cimetrix has not been able to quickly identify a cause by working remotely. On-site support is available upon request. The time and travel of Cimetrix engineers will be the financial responsibility of the customer, regardless of the nature or cause of the problem.
7. At any time, if Cimetrix has determined that the proper resolution for a problem requires a change in the Cimetrix product(s), the QCS team will submit a Software Change Request and schedule the change to be included in a software release. Our software development processes are designed to allow our engineering teams to provide rapid response and resolution to any issue.
8. Incident resolution may result from either Customer Education or Software Change. Cimetrix only closes support incidents after receiving confirmation from the customer that it has been resolved to your satisfaction.
The following diagram is a high-level representation of this Incident Resolution process.
Figure 1: Incident Resolution Process
Software Change Requests
If it is determined that your support request is the result of a Cimetrix software problem, QCS Engineers will issue a Software Change Request (SCR) that will then get escalated to the Director of QCS and the Product Manager for evaluation. Because of the complexities of the Cimetrix products Product Change Requests often may take several weeks, possibly months, to develop, test (in all applicable environments), debug, document, package, and distribute.
For high-priority problems, the QCS team will make every effort to develop a solution or Workaround that you can use until an Emergency Release or Patch Release can be delivered.
After the SCR has been logged, the engineer will provide a reference number. When a defect is resolved, the SCR number will be noted in the Release Notes of the next product release or you can contact QCS at any time to confirm the status of the SCR.
If you have received an Emergency Release or Patch Release, the QCS team will follow up with you to confirm resolution of your reported problem. If you have verified the fix, you may contact QCS so the incident can be closed. If for some reason the problem is not resolved, or you are dissatisfied with the resolution, your incident will remain open while QCS personnel continue to work on the problem.
Escalation procedures
If at any point, the Cimetrix incident resolution process is not meeting your expectations, you may call our attention to the cause of your dissatisfaction by contacting the Director of our Quality Customer Support team directly. Problem escalations will receive prompt attention and management focus. The Director will work with our technical staff and Cimetrix management to ensure that your expectations are met and that your request is being handled appropriately.
4 Software Releases
Our standard product support and maintenance agreements entitle the customer to receive any software releases for the supported products.
If the resolution of a support incident requires a software change, those activities are managed under Cimetrix’s Software Maintenance processes. These processes ensure quality and reliability in our products. There are essentially three types of software updates that are produced during the software maintenance activities:
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Release |
Characteristics |
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Emergency Release (ER) Unplanned, very critical / urgent correction |
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Patch Release Unplanned release for one or more urgent issues |
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Service Release Scheduled Product Maintenance Release |
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Cimetrix will work with the customer to determine the most appropriate release plan to incorporate any required Software Change Requests. The following diagram illustrates the high-level procedure followed to determine which type of release will include the applicable SCR(s).
Figure 2: Types of Software Releases
5 Cimetrix Product Maintenance Policy
Cimetrix strives to keep our active products current with the relevant operating systems, development tools, and software standards. Cimetrix develops product roadmaps that allow us to plan product improvements to incorporate and leverage advancements in the supporting technologies and standards. To the extent possible, Cimetrix plans to incorporate these changes in scheduled Service Releases according to the following Policy[1]. This policy is applicable to the following Cimetrix Products only:
- SECSConnectTM
- CIMConnectTM
- CIM300TM
- CIMPortalTM Plus
- CIMControlFrameworkTM
- Cimetrix HostConnectTM
- Cimetrix EquipmentTestTM
- Cimetrix SapienceTM
Guiding Principles
Cimetrix has the following Guiding Principles when developing plans for software product improvements:
- Solution-oriented approach focusing on factory requirements above and beyond the industry standards
- Target Microsoft technologies
- Stay current with standards and industry-proven technology
- Continuous improvement of reliability, flexibility, and ease-of-use
- Maintain backward compatibility
Cimetrix Product Versions
If covered by a Software Support and Maintenance Agreement, Cimetrix will provide Technical Support and defect corrections for versions of software products up to 5 years after a newer version of the product has been released.
Unless otherwise provided for in a custom agreement, Cimetrix performs proactive maintenance and implements product enhancements only for the most recently released product version. This includes changes to support new versions of Microsoft products and new versions of SEMI standards. Customers who wish to obtain these improvements must upgrade to the new release or establish a Custom Software Support Agreement.
Microsoft Operating Systems and Development Tools
It is Cimetrix’s goal to implement any necessary product changes to work properly with new versions of supported Microsoft operating systems and development tools within 1 year of their retail availability.
In general, Cimetrix’s policy for Microsoft operating system and development tool support is consistent with the Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy which took effect in October 2002 and is described on their website at http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/.
Cimetrix targets specific versions of the Microsoft operating systems and development tools for each product release. The product release notes indicate the versions of the operating system supported at the time of the release. Cimetrix will continue to support those versions of the Microsoft products as long as Microsoft considers them to be in the Mainstream or Extended support phases (typically up to 10 years).
In general, Cimetrix does not support Microsoft operating systems, business or development software that is no longer in the Mainstream or Extended support phases according to the Microsoft lifecycle for any Cimetrix product. Cimetrix does not support any Microsoft product that has not yet been released for general retail availability.
SEMI Standards
It is Cimetrix’s goal to implement any necessary product changes to work properly with new versions of supported SEMI standards within 2 years of their publication.
For relevant software products, Cimetrix targets specific versions of the SEMI standards to be implemented and supported for each release. The product release notes indicate the version of the standard supported at the time of the release. Cimetrix strives to maintain backward compatibility with older versions of the SEMI standards; however, Cimetrix cannot maintain support for all versions of all relevant standards.
Users should review the product documentation carefully and contact Cimetrix customer support for inquiries regarding support of any specific SEMI standard revision.
6 Customer Satisfaction
Consistently improving quality of service is a very high priority within Cimetrix. Customer feedback is extremely valuable in terms of how we handle support and improve our processes. We encourage our customers to send feedback regarding your overall experience and satisfaction with Cimetrix support services and our products. Comments and suggestions can be sent at any time via e-mail to support@cimetrix.com. Cimetrix will also occasionally send customer surveys enabling customers to provide us with valuable feedback about our support services and areas of potential improvement. Cimetrix management reviews every survey response and creates action items where appropriate. Individual survey responses will not be shared with other companies, nor will they be used for marketing activities. The sole purpose of survey results is to evaluate our performance and provide an elevated level of products and services to our customers.
[1] Cimetrix reserves the right to discontinue support for any of its software products, product versions, operating system, development tool, or SEMI standard at any time subject to the terms of any effective Software Support and Maintenance Agreements.
