Sustainment Engineering works tickets escalated to them from the Tech Support group at Hach. A ticket would be escalated to Sustainment Engineering when that ticket requires a product modification (like a bug fix) or complex troubleshooting or configuration issues.

Ticket Category

Sustainment Engineering works customer tickets based on a prioritized queue system. The system is setup to address the most pressing customer issues sooner. When your ticket is escalated to Sustainment engineering, it will be assigned one of four possible categories: Feature Request, High Severity, Medium Severity, and Low Severity.

Feature Requests are modifications to the system to add new functionality or modify existing functionality to work differently. Feature requests do not enter the Sustainment Engineering queue. Instead they are reviewed by the product team to determine if the feature should or should not be implemented. There are many criteria that the product team considers, such as how the feature relates to the core value of the system, how many customers would the feature benefit, and how hard would the feature be to implement. There is no guarantee that all feature requests will be implemented nor is there a guarantee on when a feature request might be implemented. Feature requests are reviewed by the product team and give the team a good sense of the features the product might be lacking. It's a great way to have your voice heard on a product level.

High Severity tickets are tickets related to the worst issues in our system. These issues involve complete loss of functionality in a customer's system. This can range from crashes to invalid data or calculations. The Sustainment Engineering team prioritizes these issues before all others. 

Medium Severity tickets are related to issues that involve a loss of functionality but typically have a work around. The team understands that these workarounds are not ideal scenarios but since the product is functioning on a whole, they must prioritize these after High Severity issues. A medium severity issue may also be related to a feature in the product that is not deemed core to the product.

Low Severity tickets are related to any issue which does not directly affect the ability to access the core features of the system. This can range from cosmetic issues such as misspelling or awkward placement to minor features being inaccessible. These tickets are prioritized last. 

Sustainment Process

Sustainment will work the queue starting with the highest and oldest severity issues first. The oldest High Severity issue will be work first. If there are no more high severity issues, then the oldest Medium severity issue will be worked and so on. While there are any remaining high severity issues, a medium severity issue will not be worked. It also means that a low severity issue will not be worked while there are any high or medium severity issues in queue.

When a new ticket is escalated to sustainment Engineering, the ticket is placed in the queue based on it's severity. For example, if there are 3 high severity tickets and 2 medium severity tickets and the team recieves a new high severity ticket, that ticket will be placed in the queue after the 3 existing high severity tickets but before any of the medium severity tickets. We believe this is the best process to provide the most impactful bug fixes sooner.

Once an engineer has begun work on your ticket, they will take it to completion. This means that if an engineer begins working on a medium severity ticket and then a high severity ticket is escalated, the engineer will continue to work on the medium severity ticket until completion. Once they have finished that medium severity ticket, they will go and take care of the high severity ticket. 

An engineer may contact you while working on your ticket if the engineer needs more information. If an engineer contacts you for information, they will allow a certain amount of time for a response. If they do not receive a response within a reasonable amount of time, they will put your issue back into the queue and work the next ticket. Because of this, it's important for you to respond to the engineer as soon as possible otherwise you may need to wait a bit longer for your fix. It is recommended that you subscribe to your ticket in the customer support portal as this will give you a clue as to how close the team is to pulling your issue.