Every week my order gets delayed.

[Scott]

Deleted my message again lol. Terrible customer service.

We aren't customer service.

Does putting it on a line on its own help you any?

We also aren't here to argue with you. You're being completely ignorant and I feel deliberately obtuse (I genuinely hope for my sanity that it's deliberate at least). To that end I'm no longer going to even respond to anything you have to say. Arguing with someone who appears to be an idiot is just idiotic.

I'm away to have a word with myself.

 

[keithbeaks]

most companies have people who work for them active on the forums. Like I said this is the only one I’ve used that’s directly owned by pcs but not frequented by PCS employees.

This is the only forum you've ever used that doesn't have company employees active?? Lol

 

[WhiskyMac]

The web estimates are not being used, the system can’t handle with the current situation and isn’t very accurate.

PCS will be sending out weekly updates to let you know estimations, but it’s roughly 25 working days atm.

I've still not received an update on mine so I don't believe we can rely on the weekly updates. Last I heard was the generic COVID-19 update as to expect some extended time frames. Assume I must be way down the list for some reason although supposed to be on WD 12.

 

[SlimCini]

Just reading this thread for fun.

Is it wrong to wish that PCS hire a random nobody off the street with no skill to build the PCs of those that are complaining that they don't hire temporary random unskilled staff?

 

[Scott]

Just reading this thread for fun.

Is it wrong to wish that PCS hire a random nobody off the street with no skill to build the PCs of those that are complaining that they don't hire temporary random unskilled staff?

Think the silver warranty would need to be made compulsory.

 

[Scott]

Needs to be good tape and maybe some WD40. Here is the formal training guide:

 

[nick_123]

Just reading this thread for fun.

Is it wrong to wish that PCS hire a random nobody off the street with no skill to build the PCs of those that are complaining that they don't hire temporary random unskilled staff?

Just some reckless abandon.

 

[Scott]

I have some cheap medical tape which sometimes sticks....would that be any good?

Oooo sounds like a low tech time delay release mechanism.

 

[Tony1044]

So I'll admit I didn't read through the whole thread but just an FYI - I work in IT. Have done for longer than I care to admit.

There are tremendous supply chain issues globally right now.

First you have the impact of Coronovirus. Add to that, most of the factories and fabrication plants churn out based on Just In Time (JIT) production, as it cuts the risk of holding stock that costs money that then doesn't get used.

The supply chain issues are going all the way back to the actual component manufacturers, not just the companies slapping those components onto boards.

There were already price and stock fluctuations due to the trade war that a certain US president was engaging in that have been causing some manufacturers to scale back before Covid.

Now...add on the fact that there has been a massive shift to working from home that has seens shortages across the board from bikes, to desks, to webcams, laptops, printers and so on, and this again just exascerbates the situation.

On a flip side, there have been various comments over the years where people have felt PCS could tighten up their expecte delivery dates as it's never seemed that accurate when buying. That said, they may well have done this. However, it seems to me that they're doing their best under some rough circumstances.

As others have said, there will be completely different ways of working in the company with fewer people spread out more.

Of course it's frustrating when you drop two grand (or however much more or less) on a new piece of kit to see the time it is taking grow and grow.

But also, as others have pointed out, why on earth would you leave yourself in a position where you can't work before you even took delivery? That is crazy. Also - your nephew waited two years...I am sure if you explained the situation, he'd be more than willing to send it back for a couple more months.

And finally - as others have again pointed out - it's not easy to get qualified staff in to build machines. There's health and safety, electrostatic training, manual handling, etc training that all needs to be done without even getting to the whole understanding how a machine is put together properly.

I was once on a very secure site and we had trouble getting build staff who were suitably qualified and cleared.

We ended up allowing two of our own guys - both of whom were in relatively senior positions - do the builds. This was servers and they needed to do some simple script-driven* tasks:

Take the server off the shelf;
Note it's asset number and procure the correct number and type of CPU's, RAM and HDD's and if necessary an addtional drive tray and controller
Procure a fibre-network card (one of two types based on the role of the server)
Physically build
Setup the RAID Arrary and create logical disks

None of these were particularly taxing tasks.

Yet... the failure rate was over 80%.

Because: They rushed. It even turned out they had a race one day and they literally borked over 20 CPU's by forcing them in wrong and then closing the cages (bent/snapped pins). Cost around £40k for the CPU's alone;

They didn't match the assets up correctly so we ended up with all manner of incorrect RAM/CPU/Partition/NIC configurations

The end result was that every single server had to be opened, everythign removed and rebuilt from scratch.

Oh and none of the CPU's were (obviously) replaced under warranty.

So...it really, really, matters that you get the right people even for what you might consider a simple task.

*Script as in written instructions.

 

[TwoBrainCells]

Doesn't matter what they produce, they shouldn't take anymore orders if they are overwhelmed with orders.
I just remembered someone said 'i have no clue how an IT warehouse works"

A RAM check alone is overnight for 12 hours.

I just had to reply to this, no connection whatsoever to the main topic, but clearly there is a difference between an IT job from an office and an IT job in a warehouse.

Here is a little story
Google "Foxconn" in Chezh Republic, see what they produce, i worked for them a little under a year as a quality controller.
The short version is that they are building HP and custom servers for data/coins mining. That was back in 2005 if i remember right.
They are building everything from ground up, including parts.
We worked 3 weeks in a row, 12 hours shifts just to cope with the orders, but we didn't had a pandemic back then.
128 gigs of ram, 2-4-6-8 TB SSD's when people were looking at a 125 GB SSD saying it's too expensive, 4 GHz procs overclocked and from 6 to 12 fans. Those servers didn't look anything like a normal PC.
In the building phase it took @ 15-20 mins to test everything, we had special programs that were forcing a server to do a months work in 10 mins. If something didn't failed in those 10 mins.
When they were building the parts they were checked by 5 engineers and another 5 quality controllers before they sent it out to the assembly line.
I was in the second phase of testing the servers where we let them do a job for an hour under stress.
From hundred of servers built every single day we had around 5-10 return where 8 of them were damaged.
As long as i know you get a lifetime warranty for ram.
OFC here they are doing something different.
But, someone asked, why they are still taking orders if they are overwhelmed?
If they stop the orders for 2-4 days they can catch up with everything else.
I don't want to be mean or anything, just asking.

 

[Scott]

I think this is a very one sided view of the situation to be honest. Think about it logically, what difference do you think stopping orders for 5-10 days would make?

On day 10 there would simply be a wave of orders coming in. It wouldn't make any difference to the current workload as all the orders would be in the queue at the end anyway.

What is important right now is to manage expectations. I would hope that there have been lessons learned by PCS in the shortcomings of their estimator and that customers from now on will have a better view of the lay of the land with regards to the processing time.

There is absolutely nothing that can be done right now to have any impact on your order or anyone elses order that's currently in the queue. Customers just joining the queue, or a few days in, aren't frustrated and angry at the lack of transparency on the wait times. Nothing will cure that, it just needs chalked up and dealt with going forward.

 

[Deleted member 88683]

The thing is too many people want it both ways, if PCS pulled orders, people would be moaning left right and center, i mean hats off to them for working through whilst everyone else shut down, as with all companies who worked through it the strain has been high i can imagine. Takes well over an hour to get through to most companies who were/are still operating as a pose to closing the doors. I wish people would be more appreciative and considerate for companies who choose to not close the doors and put their business and staff at risk but they are not, its all about greed, i want i want, you have my money etc. It is like the travel companies, large airlines go bust and everyone is shouting oh that is a shame the gov should bail them etc, it is also them same people demanding compensation when their flight is 1 hour late. What comes around goes around, stop moaning, it is what it is, if you don't like it find a less reputable company to order from...Thank you PCS staff for all your hard work and i hope you keep going for years to come.

I will add, stopping orders to catch up is a reasonable suggestion but i guess the company has to weight up how damaging that could also be. I can imagine they get a lot of orders a day, that would be a lot of orders lost for how many days they stop orders for which could be damaging again but as mentioned above, what can you do, wait and be respectful and appreciate or just move to another company and hope you don't end up in the same situation.

Some wont like the above, and some will, its the nature of everything.

Hope you get your orders soon!

 

[ubuysa]

Suggesting that PCS 'stop taking orders in order to catch up' is selfish in the extreme. It's basically saying to hell with everyone else, I just want my build now. Whatever happened to 'were all in this togdther'?

Via Tapatalk

 

[Tony1044]

Doesn't matter what they produce, they shouldn't take anymore orders if they are overwhelmed with orders.
I just remembered someone said 'i have no clue how an IT warehouse works"


I just had to reply to this, no connection whatsoever to the main topic, but clearly there is a difference between an IT job from an office and an IT job in a warehouse.

Here is a little story
Google "Foxconn" in Chezh Republic, see what they produce, i worked for them a little under a year as a quality controller.
The short version is that they are building HP and custom servers for data/coins mining. That was back in 2005 if i remember right.
They are building everything from ground up, including parts.
We worked 3 weeks in a row, 12 hours shifts just to cope with the orders, but we didn't had a pandemic back then.
128 gigs of ram, 2-4-6-8 TB SSD's when people were looking at a 125 GB SSD saying it's too expensive, 4 GHz procs overclocked and from 6 to 12 fans. Those servers didn't look anything like a normal PC.
In the building phase it took @ 15-20 mins to test everything, we had special programs that were forcing a server to do a months work in 10 mins. If something didn't failed in those 10 mins.
When they were building the parts they were checked by 5 engineers and another 5 quality controllers before they sent it out to the assembly line.
I was in the second phase of testing the servers where we let them do a job for an hour under stress.
From hundred of servers built every single day we had around 5-10 return where 8 of them were damaged.
As long as i know you get a lifetime warranty for ram.
OFC here they are doing something different.
But, someone asked, why they are still taking orders if they are overwhelmed?
If they stop the orders for 2-4 days they can catch up with everything else.
I don't want to be mean or anything, just asking.

15-20 minutes is about 1.5 reboots for an HP server. Seriously I've never known a slower POST process. Especially since they introduced their sea of sensors!

I worked for HP a couple of times. Once in 2012 and again in 2015 - guess who was struggling to provide laptops to their own staff both times... Genuinely they had global shortages both times. Unreal.

They didn't stop taking orders either. It would be fatal to any system builder.

I bought a Dell laptop in Feb. It was a factory refurb so was pretty much built but it still took 12 working days before it was in my possession.

In the building phase it took @ 15-20 mins to test everything, we had special programs that were forcing a server to do a months work in 10 mins. If something didn't failed in those 10 mins.

How? How is this physically possible? I am sure you were told this was the case but how can you turn 43,200 minutes worth of runtime into 10 minutes? The maths simply do not work unless you are claiming that each of those servers was being run at 1/4320th of its capacity. I want the person who sold that software selling my solutions because they're clearly talented!

I suspect more likely, you had a torture application that ramped as much as possible up to 100% but still...10 mins isn't worth bothering with (true story - I once had a pair of 42U racks covered in a dust sheet...it took about 28 minutes before the servers began shutting down due to overheating) and all hell broke loose (story for another time)

For your information I've worked in warehousing and logistics, finance, military, government (local and national), oil and gas, education, law, energy and nuclear.

I helped to build Rolls Royce's global virtualisation platform in HP's data centres - imagine a warehouse full of 42U racks of c7000 chassis, fibre SANS, all the networking and so on. Then triple it. I am fully averse with servers and the differences compared to "normal" PC's - actually I am far more comfortable with servers, as it's where I do my work.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Doesn't matter what they produce, they shouldn't take anymore orders if they are overwhelmed with orders.
I just remembered someone said 'i have no clue how an IT warehouse works"


I just had to reply to this, no connection whatsoever to the main topic, but clearly there is a difference between an IT job from an office and an IT job in a warehouse.

Here is a little story
Google "Foxconn" in Chezh Republic, see what they produce, i worked for them a little under a year as a quality controller.
The short version is that they are building HP and custom servers for data/coins mining. That was back in 2005 if i remember right.
They are building everything from ground up, including parts.
We worked 3 weeks in a row, 12 hours shifts just to cope with the orders, but we didn't had a pandemic back then.
128 gigs of ram, 2-4-6-8 TB SSD's when people were looking at a 125 GB SSD saying it's too expensive, 4 GHz procs overclocked and from 6 to 12 fans. Those servers didn't look anything like a normal PC.
In the building phase it took @ 15-20 mins to test everything, we had special programs that were forcing a server to do a months work in 10 mins. If something didn't failed in those 10 mins.
When they were building the parts they were checked by 5 engineers and another 5 quality controllers before they sent it out to the assembly line.
I was in the second phase of testing the servers where we let them do a job for an hour under stress.
From hundred of servers built every single day we had around 5-10 return where 8 of them were damaged.
As long as i know you get a lifetime warranty for ram.
OFC here they are doing something different.
But, someone asked, why they are still taking orders if they are overwhelmed?
If they stop the orders for 2-4 days they can catch up with everything else.
I don't want to be mean or anything, just asking.

Foxconn are not an IT firm, they’re a manufacturing plant, there’s like zero similarity.

 

[aydmer]

I ordered a PC almost a month ago, I believe they are busy because of corona, I believe they are having a hard time because of the lockdown in England, for the rest I don't believe anything, they first said 12 working days, then one says 2 days delay, few days later they said 5 days delay and now they say 7 days delay, why are they just not honest, when I call they respond like: hello, there is corona ?!
The whole world knows that there is corona, keep that in mind if you promise something!
I also work at a webshop and we are also super busy because of corona, but we take into account the corona when we give time indication to our customers, if we see that we are not going to make it, we will contact you immediately and offer we apologize, we make a nice compensation because we can't keep our promise!
Here you need to take contact with PCS and take corona into account,i wonder, has that corona been in UK for a week? That's no excuse gentlemen, stay professional.


my complaint is not about the moderators here nor the people I speak to when I call them is about the management. there will probably also be people saying, just cancel, I waited a month so no.

PS: a month further and they have not even started on my PC.

 

[SpyderTracks]

I ordered a PC almost a month ago, I believe they are busy because of corona, I believe they are having a hard time because of the lockdown in England, for the rest I don't believe anything, they first said 12 working days, then one says 2 days delay, few days later they said 5 days delay and now they say 7 days delay, why are they just not honest, when I call they respond like: hello, there is corona ?!
The whole world knows that there is corona, keep that in mind if you promise something!
I also work at a webshop and we are also super busy because of corona, but we take into account the corona when we give time indication to our customers, if we see that we are not going to make it, we will contact you immediately and offer we apologize, we make a nice compensation because we can't keep our promise!
Here you need to take contact with PCS and take corona into account,i wonder, has that corona been in UK for a week? That's no excuse gentlemen, stay professional.


my complaint is not about the moderators here nor the people I speak to when I call them is about the management. there will probably also be people saying, just cancel, I waited a month so no.

PS: a month further and they have not even started on my PC.

I’m not going to try and make you feel any better, I suggest you read over this thread from the beginning to see what’s been improved over the last week.

 

[WhiskyMac]

I’m not going to try and make you feel any better, I suggest you read over this thread from the beginning to see what’s been improved over the last week.

But Spyder - I have not had any email indicating a potential build date. So unless i'm alone there will be others for whom nothing has been improved.

I previously emailed them about the increase in wait times - and got a very generic email back this afternoon - which disappointingly spent three large paragraphs explaining their usual timelines for build, testing and shipping etc rather than answer my question - and then casually that unfortunately they may have "miss lead at the time of purchase" as of course there is Coronavirus etc which has led to a sudden surge in demand on "all their services" however that there is no stock issue - if they did not have stock then we would receive an email notification to that effect.

So I'm left wondering when my PC might even enter the build stage as plenty others on the forums were getting emails as to estimates for their builds. Some who ordered before me and some who ordered after me. I think the emails as to potential build date is the right thing to do - then if it slips say more than 3 days in future say just send an update. Like its very disappointing to not have any indication from a company as to when i might receive a product thats cost upwards of £3k - COVID or not. Am I waiting to August now? I don't have any clue now as clear all previous timelines are to be ignored.

If as they say there is no stock issues, then they must know what an average build takes timewise - what their current team resources are - where everyone is in the queue. As such coming to a updated rough estimate for those who are in pre-production can't be rocket science. So surely they can get these updates out more quickly.

 

[SpyderTracks]

But Spyder - I have not had any email indicating a potential build date. So unless i'm alone there will be others for whom nothing has been improved.

Have you read through this thread, it specifically says how they're sending out updates and why some people haven't received them yet.

 

[Deleted member 88683]

But Spyder - I have not had any email indicating a potential build date. So unless i'm alone there will be others for whom nothing has been improved.

I previously emailed them about the increase in wait times - and got a very generic email back this afternoon - which disappointingly spent three large paragraphs explaining their usual timelines for build, testing and shipping etc rather than answer my question - and then casually that unfortunately they may have "miss lead at the time of purchase" as of course there is Coronavirus etc which has led to a sudden surge in demand on "all their services" however that there is no stock issue - if they did not have stock then we would receive an email notification to that effect.

So I'm left wondering when my PC might even enter the build stage as plenty others on the forums were getting emails as to estimates for their builds. Some who ordered before me and some who ordered after me. I think the emails as to potential build date is the right thing to do - then if it slips say more than 3 days in future say just send an update. Like its very disappointing to not have any indication from a company as to when i might receive a product thats cost upwards of £3k - COVID or not. Am I waiting to August now? I don't have any clue now as clear all previous timelines are to be ignored.

If as they say there is no stock issues, then they must know what an average build takes timewise - what their current team resources are - where everyone is in the queue. As such coming to a updated rough estimate for those who are in pre-production can't be rocket science. So surely they can get these updates out more quickly.

Interesting, i have not had that yet, but i see the point you are making here is that there should be more frequent updates, rather than nothing for 2 weeks and then an email saying, oh its going to be another 2 weeks, at which point your half way there and left debating if you should pull out or not.