What a 2 a.m. chiller failure teaches you about vendor contracts

The chiller went down at 2 a.m. on a Saturday. The service level agreement promised a four-hour response, and the engineer arrived in three.

He then waited eleven hours for a part.

What the contract missed

Response time is the easiest thing to write into a facility management contract and the least useful. What actually determines downtime is:

• Who holds critical spares, and where they are physically stored
• Whether the vendor can authorise a replacement without waiting on a purchase order
• Escalation that reaches a decision maker outside business hours

None of those were in our agreement. All three are in it now.

The clause worth adding

The vendor shall maintain, at a named location within four hours' travel, a spares inventory covering the critical asset list at Schedule 3, and shall evidence that inventory quarterly.

It is not elegant drafting. It has saved us two outages since.