DriveSafety offers its driving simulation customers a variety of support programs including Technical Support, Software Maintenance, Preventative Maintenance, Hourly Support, Product Training and Consulting.
All simulators come with a one year warranty from installations for capital purchase, or forever for CDS subscription purchases (the equipment is owned by DriveSafety and "rented" by the medical facility).
For capital purchases, the first year of support and maintenance is including in new purchase. All on-site travel requirements are billed separately. Subsequent years can be purchased individually or in bulk; e.g., two or three year increments.
Technical Support
The DriveSafety technical support (TS) program provides customers the ability to interface with DriveSafety on technical incidents – hardware and software – associated with the DriveSafety driving simulator. Customers open incidents through email (support@drivesafety.com) or telephone (1.801.599.9209). Each is logged and tracked independently. DriveSafety will assign an individual to each incident. DriveSafety will respond in a timely and professional manner.
The TS program is not a product training program. If the inquiry is obviously more along the lines of a training need, DriveSafety may recommend a different course of action involving product training (see Product Training below).
Software Maintenance
DriveSafety updates its Vection™, HyperDrive™, CDS™ and management software from time to time. Updates may include new features, product enhancements, updated scenarios and/or bug fixes. DriveSafety has no firm release schedules for major or minor software updates. Updates are typically provided to DriveSafety customers via mobile media; e.g., CD. The customer performs the update itself, unless contracted with DriveSafety; e.g., as part of a preventative maintenance plan (see below). For CDS systems, software updates can be via CD media or remote access; the method is determined by the customer.
Preventative Maintenance
The DriveSafety Preventative Maintenance (PM) program provides technical support (as described above) and includes an annual on-site preventative maintenance visit. At a mutually agreeable date and time, DriveSafety will send a technical representative to the customer’s site for up to two full days. If additional time is required to address customer needs or desires, customer must agree in writing to pay associated costs at standard DriveSafety rates for On-Site Hourly Support. A customer also has the ability to add additional days or additional on-site visits to their annual contract; e.g., five days per visit or two visits per year for three days each.
The representative will address any specific system faults the customer may have as well as perform a system tune-up and address any recommended upgrades. If any hardware needs to be replaced (outside the 180 day warranty period), the customer will be given the costs and the ability to approve the repair and associated fee. If DriveSafety needs to return for a visit outside of the agreed upon TS/PM contract, this cost must be covered by the customer, paid in advance of the actual on-site visit.
Hourly Support
For customers who wish support but do not have a TS or TS/PM contract, DriveSafety is able to provide remote and on-site hourly support.
Remote hourly support occurs via email or telephone is billed in increments of a half-hour during DriveSafety’s Standard Business Hours (SBH) (1 hour outside of SBH) with a minimum of 1/2 hour during SBH (1 hour outside of SBH). These hourly rate apply to any research and testing DriveSafety must do to address the customer’s incident. For example, the actual phone time per customer incident might be thirty minutes but the research might entail several hours. The customer will be billed for all directly-related time.
If the customer does not have a support contract and DriveSafety is required to travel to and from the customer site outside of the 180 day warranty period, the customer will be billed for the time, travel costs and for any hardware replacement parts plus a handling fee plus all shipping costs. All on-site visits will be billed in four-hour increments with an eight hour minimum. Any out-of-scope work (non-covered items or non-failure related incident) rates can be negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
Product Training
DriveSafety provides on-site and remote training services. Training is different than technical support. It is typically associated with questions of a “how do you do this?” nature. For example, “how do you collect a specific variable?” or “how do you create a scripted event in HyperDrive?”
On-site training is recommended for any individual who is new to the DriveSafety simulator, the Vection™, HyperDrive Authoring Suite™, CDS™, and/or management software. On-site training is typically two days in length for research simulators, a few hours for clinical simulators. DriveSafety will conduct a training session to as many people as the customer requires provided they have adequate facilities and computing resources.
Remote training is typically phone or e-mail based and limited to specific questions and emergency situations. It may include research and follow-up communication which are counted as part of the remote training time.
Consulting
DriveSafety provides consulting for a variety of customer requirements; e.g., scenario design, tile creation, data collection scripting, etc. Consulting is customized based on the requirement and is billed at a pre-arranged scope, length and hourly rate.