MasterControl Technical Support (2024)

Technical support is the service provided by MasterControl to answer questions and provide solutions to problems customers may have with the software.

MasterControl maintains several levels of support, ranging from online self-help to in-person assistance. All these options are put in place to provide greater customer satisfaction.

• Solution Overview: MasterControl Quality Excellence

The Technical Support program includes:

• Maintenance Support Service This service provides automatic software upgrades and unlimited technical assistance either through e-mail or via the telephone, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mountain Time, Monday to Friday.
• Self-Service Web Portal You may use this Web portal to resolve common issues by searching the Solutions Knowledge Base; to submit a problem report at any time; to submit enhancement ideas; and to review the status of a problem or enhancement report.
• MasterControl Installation The Tech Support team performs the initial phase of implementation for all new customers.
• MasterControl Premium Support Options These services supplement general technical support options by providing services tailored to meet an organization's unique needs. Premium services include the Technical Account Manager (TAM) and Sysadmin Service offerings to customers seeking a dedicated support resource or a system administrator who ensures that MasterControl software products are managed effectively.
• Custom Support Options In today's worldwide marketplace, MasterControl understands that local laws, market conditions, and support requirements may vary by location and by industry sector. Therefore, MasterControl offers custom, fee-based support relationships. These custom support relationships may include live technical assistance and engineering patch support. Customers can contact their MasterControl regional account executive for more information.

MasterControl Product Support Lifecycle Overview

The MasterControl Product Support Lifecycle program provides a consistent and standard product support policy at the time of release for all MasterControl products. This program is designed to establish a clear and predictable support program, to help customers manage their support requirements, and to help customers with their information technology planning.

MasterControl recommends that customers stay as current as possible with product releases to attain the following benefits:

• Increase security – Our customers store critical information in MasterControl, and helping keep this information secure is paramount. In today's world, new security threats are a common occurrence, and one of the best reasons for staying current with MasterControl is staying current with the improvements made to thwart these threats.

• Incorporate updates – A very large community of customers use the MasterControl software and help improve the software quality by identifying problems that are corrected with each release.

• Leverage enhancements – This same community identifies enhancements that simplify or streamline tasks that are common to most. These enhancements are incorporated into each release (not patch releases).

• More effective responses – The more recent a product release, the more likely that current MasterControl staffers are familiar with the product. . MasterControl personnel are able to more quickly and effectively provide consulting or respond to questions with product releases they are familiar with.

To encourage customers to stay as current as possible, customers with active MSA can upgrade to a newer release of the same product at any time. MasterControl understands that upgrading software may require retraining and for life sciences companies, some amount of validation. MasterControl has created a series of initiatives to minimize the time and expense associated with upgrading and validating. The MasterControl Transfer OQ (TOQ) addresses the IQ/OQ effort, and the PQ effort will be minimized by adopting new releases, each of which has a smaller set of changes. All of these efforts help customers upgrade more frequently and mitigate risks inherent with using older releases.

MasterControl Product Support Phases

MasterControl products are supported according to the following phases:

• Mainstream Support
  • Is provided for:

    • Annual releases: Two years following the product's release date.

    • Incremental releases: the current release.

  • Provides live technical support via phone or email during MasterControl's stated business hours.

  • MasterControl will provide engineering-level support for critical issues that risk data integrity for products in the mainstream support phase. A series of critical issues may be accumulated in a fix release for products in the mainstream support phase.

  • Customers with active MSA may upgrade to the most recent version of a product at any time with no upgrade fees.

• Extended Support

  • Is provided for five years following the product's release date.

  • Provides live technical support via phone or email during MasterControl's stated business hours.

  • MasterControl will not provide engineering patches or fix releases for products during the Extended Support phase.

  • Customers with active MSA may upgrade to the most recent version of a product at any time at no cost within 12 months of the start of Extended Support. After 12 months, an upgrade fee will be applied.

• Ongoing Support

  • Is provided for at least seven years following the product's release date.

  • By using MasterControl's self-service Web site to access product-specific information, many customers can quickly resolve their issue without contacting MasterControl directly.

  • MasterControl will not accept requests for support, design changes, or new features during the ongoing support phase.

  • Customers with active MSA may upgrade to the most recent version of a product at any time, but an upgrade fee will be applied.

MasterControl Product Fixes

Updates and fixes are created to address critical data or security issues with released versions of MasterControl software.

Enhancements and fixes are delivered with every release, scheduled approximately every three to six months. While it will be less common, some fixes may be critical enough to deliver outside of the normal incremental release process. These fixes will be provided in two forms:

• Current release patch

  • P1 issues are eligible for patching. A P1 issue is defined as a problem that causes significant down time for the customer, or that could cause data corruption, loss of data integrity or major functionality, with no available workaround.

  • If needed, patches will be made available on a weekly basis to fix P1 issues in the current release. Note, under the incremental release approach, these issues will also be fixed in future releases.

  • These patches are tested in SQA. The patches are cumulative, meaning that each new package contains all previous patches for that release.

• Annual Releases

  • Annual releases are intended for non-cloud customers who typically prefer to adopt releases at a slower rate.

  • To clarify, customers who opt to stay with an annual release will get critical fixes but will not obtain the enhancements nor the non-critical fixes delivered in the incremental releases prior to the next annual release.

  • Fixes for annual releases will be validated, which means that each patch will be manually tested and requalification steps from affected OQ documents will also be executed, reviewed, and released.

  • Validation documentation that covers all patches from the prior month will be released monthly.

MasterControl Customer Website

You can also find technical support on the MasterControl Customer Website that provides technical support documents, email support, and product and education information. This password-protected site is updated regularly to provide the latest support information to make using your MasterControl software an easier and more productive experience every day.