Hello Charles,
What Mr. Hanak said here is pretty much true. From the talk I've had with my reseller I figure that every VAR is told that they should care about their customers up to whatever extent. That counts even when the company that sold you Creo hasn't got the VAR status from PTC.
I think that is basically what has Jeniffer tried to say in her first post.
To tell you my story. I've brought one seat of Creo Parametric into our company at the beginning of this year. Tried to solve few problems with my reseller at the very beginning but after few days I found their support to be almost useless.
So as I don't mind dealing with problems like these in english I jumped directly onto PTC support. They've helped me to resolve few major issues over the next few months. That includes quick resolution of problem with running Creo Parametric 2.0 when it first came out. My reseller would never be able to resolve a problem like that one at a similar pace.
After about half year since we bought Creo, everytime when I tried to log a case I happened to see this kind of message
So as I knew how usefull the support from my reseller was I started to think about dropping the maintanance payment. I also started to think that it was a mistake to buy Creo from my reseller after all. I really thought we should have bought it directly from PTC back then.
I've had plenty of postponed issues with Creo at that moment so I bypassed the support from my reseller and went with the issues directly to the person that actually sold us Creo, in short the salesman.
He told me I shouldn't contact PTC directly but only my reseller support. I told him Creo isn't working for me the way I thought it could when we bought it. So it was decided that I write up a list of issues I've got with Creo and then send that to my reseller which I didn't contact for months till then. The salesman then cleared throaths of people sitting in their support and they finally started to work.
I am now left with only a hand full of issues that I think only a good update can solve. Which of course isn't going to happen. And anyway I can now live with that and I think I will make my boss to pay the maintenance support for the next year also.
Another story. One month ago I've borrowed licences for couple of Creo modules. I've sure had trouble making them run on the day one of testing and after like one whole day my reseller support figured out that the modules and licences are meant to be only for Creo 1.0.
I've then started to contact the people from PTC support that I dealt with in past directly as case logger doesn't work anymore. While telling to my reseller that I am not going to install Creo 1.0 remake the templates there and so on just for the testing purpose and that for obvious reasons I try to avoid Creo 1.0 like a plague.
After couple more days I've finally had Creo 2.0 up and running with the borrowed modules. Woohoo. No word from any of the PTC's employees. But about one week after that I suddenly got a call telling me that I've opened a case today that I can't log a cases online, then it turned out someone else from PTC opened it instead of me.
Here's the link:
https://www.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/case.jsp?n=11061377
So I think it's possible to get your issues to the right places. My reseller is able to contact the PTC support directly and I bet he does that on almost every issue I throw at them.
The problem here is that they are just lazy to contact PTC support but if they actually do and really care then almost any issue can be resolved from their side after a while. Sometimes clearing their throats is necesarry but that's how it goes.
Lol, they are never gonna help me with anything anymore once they read this post.
I think if your reseller is unable to help you or just too lazy to contact PTC support with your issues then you should be able to change the company that support's PTC products for you.
To be honest I hate to contact my reseller with issues related to instalation of the product and bug reports. I already bother them enough with real issues I've got. PTC support can resolve those with like push of a button.
Actually as I think of it now I didn't report any of the bugs I've found in Creo Parametric 2.0 in about last 4 months or so. You can be sure I am not gonna bother my reseller with those.
Good luck with finding someone who can help you with your issues.
Regards,
~Jakub
