Senior Chemist

Purchased two $70,000+ instruments within a couple years and the story is oddly very similar, which points to a systemic Company failure for Thermo Fisher in my opinion. Sales and specifications will claim capabilities that after 8 months of working with support simply cannot be delivered. "We will close this ticket as there is simply nothing we can do" or "That really hasn't ever worked so you can attempt some workarounds" are comments from support that are really too common when spending a lot of money for equipment. The installation engineer for our FTIR added another comment "I hope you don't actually need to use that (feature of the instrument) because for the life of me I can't get it to work and support wasn't able to find anything either." One would expect when buying what is considered their top end line of equipment that increased performance could be expected (at least to match the sales specifications) but in the end I have found that the ICS6000 has taken a lot more bench space and simply performs no better that a IC2000 system from a decade ago. The software products on both instruments, Ion Chromatography using Chromeleon, and FTIR using OMNIC both have errors and items that are simply not supported. Honest support agents will simply admit they are too buggy, so work arounds are the solution. I thought patience and an open willingness to attempt repairs would lead to a solution, but alas in the end I have found that I should have demanded they analyze samples to prove functionality before purchasing to begin with. From experience, I have found that instrument sales are not always in touch with the reality of what the instruments can actually do. The software is actually my interaction method, and unfortunately that is even less polished.