Pierce’s CopyTech staff faced a challenge in the first week of the spring semester due to broken machines and upset professors.
Some of the machines that students and professors utilize have not been working accordingly and has mostly caused tension between the CopyTech workers and professors.
In the first week of the spring semester Pierce’s CopyTech staff could do nothing about their machines being broken due to its service contract expiring on Dec. 31. 2015.
According to Larry Kraus, Associate Vice President, the service contract is a yearlong contract that is renewed during the month of November. The contract is for maintenance only and covers all the services in the CopyTech. A form is sent to Canon to alert them that a new contract is in order, but this time the administrative services were caught off guard.
Dawn Castillo, the office assistant in CopyTech, said this had been a problem prior the semester starting.“The machines had not been working two weeks before the semester began,” Castillo said.
According to Kraus parts had been dispatched and been worked on Feb. 9 and Feb. 10. “It’s immediate to repair,” said Kraus.
Some of the staff workers have been affected by the situation. Lead support assistant, Marina Ibarra shared her recent encounter with uncomprehending professors.
“Professors get mad at us (CopyTech) thinking that we don’t do our jobs,” Ibarra said. “One of them told me not to lie to them but if we don’t have maintenance, it’s out of our hands,” said Ibarra.
Student worker Sabbrina Itzol also shared her experience involving two professors and how there was not much she could do.“Two days ago I got a complaint from two professors during the evening,” said Itzol.
The CopyTech’s service contract is no longer active, making it hard for them since there is little they can do until further notice.“We should have a service contract within a week,” said Castillo.
“We work off a piggyback contract, that’s a government contract with a government pricing and everything but what happened is that Canon’s contract with the University of California (UC) contracts ended and we couldn’t do a piggyback contract and we only found out about that in late January which led us to go on a public bid,” said Kraus.
The public bidding had the administrative services asking other companies to bid on their contract so they could get the lowest price bid on it due to UC contracts not establishing a master agreement with Canon and therefore UC contracts not being able to send their public bids to the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) for a renewed contract, according to Kraus.
“We had to retool, go out for the public bids, hold the public bids, go through that process, and then submit all that documentation to the LACCD so they could reissue a new contract based off that bid,” said Kraus.
“Again it’s only for a year so we have to do it all over again,” said Kraus. “Now we know that LACCD did not get the bid from the UC contracts so we’re in a better position to know if we have to do public bid this time.”
This time around the administrative services are better prepared just in case the same situation happens again. “This year as long as UC contracts establish a master agreement with Canon, we won’t go through that process again,” said Kraus.
“We have issued emergency contracts with Canon for repair and we did that two weeks ago, and I learned this week it was approved to go ahead with our long-term one year contract. We’re going to find a balancing out at some point, it’s just a business cycle,” said Kraus.