solver.com

When you purchase a software license, you gain the benefit of our cumulative R&D investment -- representing tens of millions of dollars.  When you maintain Annual Support coverage for your software product license, you gain the further benefit of the seven-figure sum we spend every year to maintain and improve our products.  These costs can be spread across many thousands of customers, yielding great cost savings for you.

You can use our video demos, User Guides, online Help, example models, Website support pages, and recommended textbooks to learn how to use our software tools, and how to build an effective model.  Our technical support service is designed to supplement your own efforts: Getting you over stumbling blocks, pointing out relevant sections of our User Guides or example models, helping you fix a modeling error, or -- in rare cases -- working around an issue with our software (always at our expense).

An Annual Support Contract gives you access to both our software upgrades and our technical support services, for a year at a time.  For the majority of our customers, who have some level of expertise in simulation or optimization modeling, this provides everything they need.

But some customers ask us to create or modify a model or application specifically for them.  We can often do this, very cost-effectively, thanks to our technical resources and experience.  But these costs cannot be spread over many other customers.  To keep our product prices moderate, we must charge reasonable fees for consulting assistance, and draw a fair boundary between technical support for "self-service" customers, and consulting for "full-service" customers who want us to work on their specific model or application.

Consulting Assistance

Technical support includes answering any reasonable question about our software products, explaining concepts of optimization and simulation, and suggesting ways to formulate models, but it doesn't include creation or modification of models (in the form of spreadsheets or programming language code) by our technical services staff specifically for you.

Frontline Systems offers consulting assistance on a fee basis where our technical services staff will apply its expertise to your model.  Most often this involves debugging, modifying or improving a model that you or others have created, but our staff can develop a model "from scratch," given accurate specifications for the problem to be solved.

It is often more cost-effective for you to use our consulting assistance services than to build or debug a model yourself.  Our experienced technical services staff can often perform this work in a fraction of the time it would take you.  This means more rapid progress towards the results you are seeking, and very often a net savings compared to the value of the time you would otherwise spend on model development and debugging.

Please click on Annual Support Contracts - Specifics for more information on our consulting assistance services, and click on Consulting Assistance: Summary Terms/Prices for information about our terms and pricing for consulting assistance.