With these words, Matti Siltanen, who heads the Finnish customer service department, describes the main goal of Nupas-Cadmatic's customer service philosophy. This sounds simple, but the entire Nupas-Cadmatic staff is responsible for offering the best customer service on the market and it is as such not the sole responsibility of Nupas-Cadmatic's customer service departments in Finland, The Netherlands, and local support offices around the world.

"We are an international company with arguably the best 3D design tools and knowledge in the business. This needs to be supplemented by having the best customer service," says Matti Siltanen. "In general terms, the creation of this service level must be seen as a team effort including sales staff, user trainers, and designers.

Nupas-Cadmatic's customer service department in Finland has a special Software Support Team of six experienced people that are able to handle all possible helpdesk requests related to the use of the software. The team co-operates with customer service in The Netherlands, which have their own customer service organization, and with local support personnel in the client's region. "We aim at completing the client's request on the same day, or at the latest, the following day," says Siltanen. "In the event of a critical case, preventing time-critical production, the matter is naturally dealt with immediately. Fortunately these cases are rare."

The support team co-ordinates desk services, user training, special training courses as well as software tailoring tasks for the client's special application needs. Normally the Nupas-Cadmatic software license agreement includes a service agreement with software upgrades as well as support and user training.

"We are in regular contact with our clients anyway. For this reason, we receive only around one hundred actual help desk request calls per year," Siltanen said. "Very many customer requests are actually related to questions where the client wants to know our views on how to structure the design work and which design methods to use. Many clients need our help when they develop their own applications around Nupas-Cadmatic. We have recently received many questions with regards to how our customers can add their own products and data into the new COS (Cadmatic Object Storage) data architecture which came with Version 5."

The most important issue with regards to the support staff in Finland and also mostly elsewhere, is that they all have design backgrounds with solid knowledge of project development work. This user experience helps our trainers to identify areas that are difficult to learn and which training areas to focus on. This leads to more efficient training that saves time and money for our clients.

"Our clients very often purchase our system with the aim of using Nupas-Cadmatic's help in setting up the design project too, said Mr. Siltanen. "We need to understand project thinking, beginning from the task, total time schedule, costs, and which information is needed. I have personally needed my project engineering skills over the years in supporting my clients." Mr. Siltanen, however, points out; "Our customer support function does not include clients' project development, but sometimes the areas overlap."

Typical tailoring tasks, also handled by Mr. Siltanen's team, are linking project design documentation to the client's own documentation system and material administration, or linking to the client's computer aided manufacturing. "The client may also order the entire system administration work, such as piping, valve and instrumentation libraries or report forms for documents and material listings," Mr. Siltanen said.

"A typical Nupas-Cadmatic Piping customer start-up project takes about three weeks," Mr. Siltanen said, "This normally includes seven days of user training and five days of training for the Nupas-Cadmatic administrator. In addition, help is needed in starting up the design of the first project. "Investing in this type of initial training package definitely pays off in the long run, resulting in more efficient practical design work, and reduced project design hours. The use of video meetings and e-tools for remote support and training has also enhanced the Nupas-Cadmatic training."