Legal
Service level agreement
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This agreement applies to SHD Sim Enterprise subscriptions and forms part of the terms of sale. It is a contractual commitment with a remedy attached, which is what distinguishes it from the response targets published on the support page for the other tiers. Those targets are what we aim for and usually beat; they are not terms of this agreement and carry no credits.
1. What is committed
We commit to a first response time: the point at which a person has read your ticket, replied to you and begun work on it.
We deliberately do not commit to a resolution time. Nobody can honestly promise to fix a defect they have not yet seen, and a resolution SLA is either padded until it means nothing or breached the first time a problem is genuinely hard. We would rather commit to something we can keep and be measured on it.
2. Business hours
All times in this agreement are business hours: 09:00–17:30 UK time, Monday to Friday, excluding weekends and England and Wales bank holidays. A ticket raised outside those hours starts its clock at the beginning of the next business day.
There is no out-of-hours or weekend cover, and this agreement does not pretend otherwise. If your operation needs it, that is a conversation to have before you buy rather than a term to discover afterwards.
3. Severity levels and response times
Severity is set by what you can no longer do, not by how serious we consider it. You tell us the impact when you raise the ticket; we may reclassify, and if we do, the deadline is recomputed from when the ticket was raised — reclassifying cannot retrospectively excuse a missed response.
| Level | Definition | First response | Credit if missed |
|---|---|---|---|
| P1 — Nobody can work | The Software cannot be used at all by any of your seats, and there is no workaround. For example: Licence validation refuses every seat; activation fails for the whole organisation; the application will not start after an update we shipped. | Within 4 business hours | 10% |
| P2 — A major function is unusable | A significant part of the Software does not work, or one or more seats cannot work, and any workaround is materially worse. For example: A solver type fails on cases that previously ran; meshing crashes on a class of geometry; a seat cannot be reassigned. | Same business day | 5% |
| P3 — Impaired, with a workaround | Something is wrong but you can still do the work, by another route or with some inconvenience. For example: A results field exports incorrectly but is right on screen; a dialog misreports a value; a report template is malformed. | Within 2 business days | None |
| P4 — Questions and requests | How-to questions, licence and account administration, documentation, and feature requests. For example: How to set up a rotating-frame case; adding seats mid-term; asking whether a physics type is planned. | Within 3 business days | None |
4. How to raise a ticket
Email support@shd-sim.com, or raise it from the support section of your account. Either way you receive a reference in the form SHD-XXXXXX by email, and the clock starts when the ticket is received — not when it is read.
Say what you can no longer do, and include the version from Help → About and the request ID if the application showed one. A ticket we have to ask three questions about before starting is one where the response was fast and the help was not.
5. Service credits
If we miss a first-response time, you are entitled to a credit against the following month’s subscription fee, at the percentage in the table above, per missed response.
You do not have to claim it. Every ticket records when a response was due and when it arrived, we check them, and a credit that is owed is applied. A remedy that depends on the customer noticing is not much of a remedy.
Credits are capped at 20% of the monthly fee in any one month, are applied against future fees rather than paid in cash, and are the sole remedy for a missed response time under this agreement. Your statutory rights, and the rest of the terms of sale including the refund policy, are unaffected.
6. What is not covered
- Anything on the Free, Basic or Education tiers. Those have published targets on the support page and no credits.
- Problems caused by your own infrastructure — network, proxy, storage, permissions — or by software we did not supply.
- Faults in third-party components we distribute but do not maintain, beyond passing the report upstream and telling you we have. See third-party licences.
- Use outside the EULA, including modified builds and circumvented licence validation.
- Announced maintenance windows, which we give at least five business days’ notice of, except where a security fix makes that impossible.
- Feature requests. We will reply within the P4 time; we do not commit to building anything.
7. Honest limits
SHD Systems Ltd is a small company. That is the reason this agreement commits to response rather than resolution, to business hours rather than around the clock, and to credits capped at a level we can absorb without the commitment becoming one we would be tempted to argue our way out of.
If your requirements are materially different — 24/7 cover, a named engineer on call, a resolution commitment — say so and we will either agree something specific in writing or tell you plainly that we are not the right supplier. We would rather lose the sale than sign a term we cannot keep.
8. Changes
We may change this agreement for future subscription periods, with at least 30 days’ notice by email to the subscription contact. The version in force for your current period is the one published when that period began; the updated date at the top of this page identifies it.
Questions about any of this: legal@shd-sim.com