Honeywell - banned for life over customer firewall

[coppercone2]

and a sale of 1 unit is enough for killer advertising

something people don't realize is how little price and big companies matter for sales advertising. A 500k machine at a big company might get less attention then a literary a interesting looking pencil cup. Someone might even use it at 6 months of deliberations.

[SeanB]

Look at the Japanese companies, like Mitsubishi. Was helping install a motor drive cabinet that had 6 Mitsubishi inverter drives in them, and all craftsmanship on the panel was perfect. You would hope so, in a cabinet that has 0.72F of power supply capacitor, and almost another entire rack of contactors, timers and power resistors, that are there only to provide the 3 phase rectifier, power control and inrush limiting, with another fan cooled cabinet on top that has the braking resistors for the voltage spike during braking, and with a whole load of contactors, controlled by the HMI, to keep the voltage in limits. Even has 2 package air conditioners as well to keep it cool, and 200VAC fans to circulate the air inside. All parts are made in Japan as well, and all the assembly was exactly perfect, even to when placing the 6 ton cabinet, it was exactly, within 1mm, of the footprint of the old one.

[harerod]

A possible way for escalating the lack of support/documentation is to talk to the sales department. Explain the situation and how much revenue is involved, and tell them that they might lose a customer. If this doesn't help email some C-level executive....

This is happening at an higher echelon already. So far, to no avail. Well, as an external consultant I am payed by the hour, no matter how I spend my time, as long as it is related to the project. However, it is my ambition to be efficient*. I don't bill coffee breaks and I hate wasting time reverse engineering black boxes (while somebody sits on the documentation).

* Q: How many German engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Won. Ve do not häv a senz off yumor and ve are werry iffishent!

[Haenk]

Just a shot in the dark - contact them via social media. It seems this is what large companies expect you to do these days.

[forrestc]

I feel your pain....

I have a vendor I really would like to buy product from that I haven't been able to figure out how to even get someone to tell me that they're not interested in selling to me.  I've sent emails into various email boxes (including the US sales box, the headquarters box, and so on).  I've also filled out their online web form, and so on.

The only response I've ever gotten is an automatic reply that they have received my email and would get back to me.  Yeah right.

I'm going to try the "drop by their booth and talk to someone in person" thing at CES.   Hopefully I won't get stymied by the whole "you needed to talk to your sales team before hand for an appointment" thing some vendors do at CES, and will discover that I've been trying to contact them in all the wrong ways.  But I'm not holding my breath here.

Regardless, I just don't get it.  I understand the perfectly valid choice some giant companies make to limit their sales to other big companies.  Maybe Honeywell is in this category.  But there are lots of companies out there that are small enough that they should want to pick up all the sales they can, or at least not ignore potential sales until they determine the actual likely volume.

[harerod]

Just a shot in the dark - contact them via social media. It seems this is what large companies expect you to do these days.

Oh crap. It scares me, that you may be correct. In this particular project, the only dude who knows how to tweet, may be that one product manager...