Date:
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Author:
Chris Morley
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Fear And Loathing In Lost Business

The custom integration market is overflowing with companies fighting for your hard earned money. Many integrators are simply missing the mark when it comes to earning your business and delivering a fantastic custom experience. How do you pick the right one?

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Picking Out The Nuts And Bolts

One of the most important issues I’d like to touch on, and the one that prompted me to write this article, is that of some integrators going overboard when offering component choices. I will begin by saying this:

Being able to configure a system from every single computer component known to man is a bad thing.

I cannot stress enough that this should be a red flag to beginners and novices when it comes to buying a custom computer.

When a company offers fifty different motherboards from over half a dozen different vendors, and does not standardized on one or two graphics card vendors and memory manufacturers, they will never get the chance to really understand the product they are selling.

The simple, undeniable fact is that having a thousand different configuration choices on a website will lead to problems down the line, as there are no boutique builders that have the resources to do proper and prior R&D when it comes to every configuration. The truth is that there is a good chance that you could configure a system that a company has never built before! This means that you will have to do research yourself into any configuration, personally ensuring that the system you are configuring will work well for your needs.

Behind the scenes, supporting a thousand different configurations would be an absolute nightmare. Take this scenario – a builder that offers a limited number of core components, keeping their vendors to a minimum, should be able to maintain “master” systems in their technical support department that would allow them to replicate an user’s issue in-house just by recreating their computing environment. While this is an extreme example of the lengths a custom integrator may go to when it comes to ensure that their systems are properly supported, it is by no means a required bar that a custom integrator must pass. It is, however, undeniably at the exact opposite of the spectrum when it comes to some of the builders we have evaluated in the past and the philosophies they espouse in the products they offer.

Limiting the configurations available to customers will enable proper R&D across every product line. Proper thermal management, BIOS and driver revision testing, and having a known working drive "image" for each configuration that share core components means consistency to every system that leaves the dock.

Consistency, Consistency, Consistency!

Consistency must also come from the pride of the person who is physically assembling the system in front of them. Oftentimes, these are hourly workers, and some businesses will even utilize “temps”. There is nothing inherently wrong with hiring out the “grunt work” of physical component installation. Indeed it is one of the easiest things to do (and one of the reasons individuals choose to build their own system from scratch), but a company must have proper quality control in place to ensure that a proper build has been completed on an order. This means having a senior pair of eyes look at the bill of materials (BOM), and make sure the right components were installed. Certainly, this will prevent errors such as beige drives being installed in a black chassis.

So what does this mean to the consumer? Even something as rudimentary as a build check list, included with every system, will help ensure that each PC that comes off the production floor will be as well built as the last. Even if you lose your star employee, clearly dictated production processes should be enumerated in a Standard Operating Procedure of some kind. No one employee should be responsible for the quality of product shipped. Staffing changes should not affect the final product a customer may receive during times of turmoil in a company.

Companies that have given us transparency into the build process are typically the companies that do well in our evaluation program. This means that they give us some sort of check list that points out all of the steps they took to build, test, and burn in the system we purchased. At the very least, checklists tend to eliminate varying degrees of product quality that may go out the door. Without such controls, sending out systems everyday can be like Russian roulette. And that may mean a sub-par sample goes through our System Evaluation Program.

Of course, a consistently bad production process will not fare well, either.