We saw this article about appliance repair in the New York Times earlier this month entitled, “That Repair Bill is Huge, but There Are Reasons” (the complete article is linked here).  The author, Alina Tugend, did a nice job of explaining for homeowners what the cost drivers are that underlie major appliance repair:  washers, dryers, refrigerators, and the like.  After reading the article, we remarked how similar the business of “at the customer site” repair of IT printers and servers is to the home appliance fix it trade. 

 A.J. Mast for the New York Times

Second, not every spare part is on the technician’s truck or van.  By definition, in the time and materials repair environment, also known as “per incident” repair, service companies and techs can’t know in advance what failures to expect with certainty.  And since, as the economists like to say, “resources are limited”, critical parts inventory is necessarily centralized, where it may be accessed by many technicians on an as needed basis.  Also, a technician can’t always tell from a customer’s description of the problem, what replacement part may be required.  A wrong guess could be extremely costly for the repair tech or company — so they don’t and shouldn’t take that risk.

Finally, for enterprise IT equipment users, companies who depend on servers and pc’s, Zebra or Intermec label printers, Printronix line or Lexmark or HP lasers to get the work done, day in and day out — get a plan that works for you.  Does a maintenance agreement make sense for your operation?  Maybe it does or doesn’t, so do the math and find out. 

Do you have adequate back up devices or enough spare capacity to spread the work load in the event of device failure (which inevitably comes)?  If you do, then maybe time and materials onsite repair works for you, or maybe return to depot repair is even more economical.  Do you have adequate back up?  – To save money, consider used, refurbished or remanufactured equipment for your back up capacity.  We blogged on this recently.  This strategy, depending on the type of IT device and your site-specific conditions, could result in huge and recurring annual savings for your organization.

Our IT Team was searching CDW’s site one day last week for some office computing products and noticed the retail availability of “remanufactured” HP and Brother printers.  Do a Google search for “remanufactured” and check out HP’s Renew Program (linked here) which pretty succinctly points out the benefits of purchasing and using quality used and refurbished information technology equipment – I’ll summarize in my own words:  “looks and works like new, carries a warranty, and the big one:  saves you money”.  At Lexicon we’ve been providing quality used and refurbished data capture and related equipment for years, but this part of our business has a really positive growth trajectory just now I think, because of the superior value that our customers get immediately from refurbed equipment.  Much shorter payback period, faster implementation of proven technology, no operator retraining (another savings) – all adding up to a smaller investment, lower risk decision.

Seeing leading technology companies like Hewlett Packard and CDW making significant commitments to the “remanufactured” technology equipment business is another validation, in our view, of the viability of used equipment as a solution for enterprise and business-level customers.  As this is written, Lexicon has large volumes of Zebra, Intermec, and O’Neil thermal transfer printers in stock which our team has beautifully refurbished (most of them look brand new), as well as Motorola or Symbol portable or mobile terminals (MC9060, MC5040, and more).  Intermec CK handheld devices as well.

If you’re a Lexicon customer or a regular visitor to our website you’ve no doubt noticed the new look and feel at LexiconTech.com.  We’ve spent the last six months or so working on the new design and content to make our public site and RepairEngine® THE “go to” resources for enterprises that are looking for the best way to manage, maintain, and repair ALL their information technology equipment. These latest updates are crafted to support our strategy of building beyond our beginnings in enterprise mobility and barcode device repair and maintenance to include support and service for many more IT products.  (Our business development team says that we’re the “single throat to choke” for our customers!)  Now Lexicon provides, manages, and ensures quality repair and maintenance performance for point-of-sale systems and peripherals, kiosk devices, printers of all types, servers, etc.  Service in our Atlanta depot, at the factory, and at your location – where and when you need it. And we make accessing and managing repair and maintenance easy and powerful for our users with RepairEngine®.

Easy because RepairEngine® allows an enterprise to manage service for all IT equipment and devices in one place, online for FREE.  One place to manage your existing equipment maintenance relationships, contracts, warranty returns to factory, break-fix returns to the depot, or to dispatch an onsite call for printer repair — for a single location or across the enterprise.

Powerful because RepairEngine® puts all the critical data and information about your IT devices, their performance, failure history, downtime, turn-around time for repair, etc., in one place. RepairEngine®’s analytics give an enterprise team the tools and information necessary to drill down and identify failure patterns and perform root cause analysis — in order to prevent future failures and downtime.

We think RepairEngine® provides a feature set that really moves the ball forward in an operational sense for enterprises looking for a better, more efficient way to manage IT equipment maintenance and repair – and in a strategic sense as a result of it’s ability to consolidate critical data about all of an enterprise’s IT device repair & maintenance in one place.

Talk to us — we’ll show you how easy it is to get started.

A "flexible cell" repair team deploys in our new Power-Prep area to refurb some Zebra 105sl printers

We got a bigger bag

We blogged a couple of weeks ago about our expansion – we basically increased our space by about 50% to accomodate our increased volume on repair and refurbishment of barcode and point-of-sale scanners and systems (Symbol, Motorola, Intermec, NCR, etc.) and printers (Zebra, Epson, etc.) and other information technology hardware.  We added repair space, specifically what we’re now referring to as our “Power-Prep” pre-repair area that we’re excited about because it really supports our scalable processes well.  In the Power-Prep zone we can bulk-process literally hundreds of electro-mechanical devices in very short order for necessary pre-repair cleaning tasks.  Power-Prep can also be configured to bulk-process a large refurbishment order say for 100 or 200 Zebra 105sl printers or Intermec 3400e printers, etc.  Now we can quickly clean, repair/refurb, even paint onsite to make legacy devices work and look like new.

We also added desperately needed office and warehouse capacity — much to the relief of our supply chain and depot services teams, who had gotten really good at putting more than “10 pounds of  ’stuff’” in the proverbial 5 pound bag!

Every repair bay has a recyclable collection point.

I woke up to hear that today is Earth Day, in fact the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day in 1970 - wow!  It’s a sure sign of creeping old age when you can remember the first Earth Day (like I can) - ouch!  Anyway it got us thinking about the ways that we try to be good stewards of resources and the environment in our day-to-day business practices at Lexicon. 

We do some simple, but we think meaningful and important things:  we’ve got recycling collection bins for plastics and bottles at various locations throughout our facility, in repair production areas (more about that below) and staff break areas.  Since we can’t get onsite collection of consumer recyclables at our location, we bag them up and one of our employees (thanks Scott!) takes them home where he has curbside recycling service.

Every repair bay in our service center facility has a recyclable plastics collection point for housings, covers, and cases.  All of our repair processes are designed with an eye to capture reworkable electronics which are saved and siphoned off to a background, in-house recovery process for refurbishment and reuse.  We try to absolutely limit the disposal of electronic waste, but we handle that with an e-waste processor who uses environmental best practices.

Our receiving team makes it a practice to salvage and reuse good packing materials – paper, bubble wrap, even the ESD friendly version.  That team sorts these reuseable materials into bins adjacent to our pack stations and out it goes again. 

None of this is “earth-shattering” but we think it adds up to “earth-friendly”:-).

We haven’t blogged in a while — we promise to do better — but we’ve been really busy to start 2010.  Over the next few weeks we promise you’ll hear about several major new initiatives all designed to make Lexicon’s unique brand of IT hardware repair & maintenance – driven by our web-based service management system, RepairEngine®, more accessible and more capable to deliver even more services to more enterprise technology users than ever.  So watch this space for major announcements in the next couple of weeks regarding RepairEngine® and LexiconTech.com . . .

In the meantime we’ll share this:  in February we began the physical expansion of our Conyers, GA service center.  Two primary catalysts for the expansion:  1) repair volume — we had simply outgrown our space and had to have more depot floor capacity, office/admin/business development space, and our warehouse was way too small; 2) we wanted to implement a newly-designed repair strategy (on high volume lines of technology equipment we repair on a depot-basis) to improve scale economies, repair throughput, lower our per unit repair costs, and improve our already high quality.  To make that a reality we needed the physical room to utilize new processes our team has designed to incorporate multiple strategies for automated bulk or “power-repair” actions in the “pre-”, “in-”, and “post-” repair phases.  It’s really exciting stuff and we believe our customers are going to love what Lexicon can provide in terms of repair & maintenance quality and value (and volume) in 2010.

We’ll post some pictures over the next few weeks so you can see some of the Lexicon innovations in process and get a look at our expanded facility.  The great news for our customers is that we continue to make the critical capital investments in the physical assets (our expansion, etc.) and the digital, information-based assets (RepairEngine® and LexiconTech.com which you’ll hear some exciting new stuff about soon) to ensure that you get the most from your IT hardware investment — whether we’re talking mobile barcode handhelds from Symbol Motorola or Intermec, printers from Zebra or O’Neil — or POS systems and scanners from NCR, printers from Hewlett-Packard or Printronix, etc., etc. 

Nobody is going to make Technology Equipment Repair & Maintenance, or managing same, easier or better than Lexicon — and we’re going to keep proving it in 2010.

Earlier this week, we caught a story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about UPS’s plan to test and deploy the next generation handheld device that their drivers use to manage the flow of packages in pickup and delivery operations.  According to this story, this will make the 5th generation of their “DIAD” (Delivery Information Acquisition Device) handheld terminal — this one apparently from Honeywell (the conglomerate which acquired HandHeld Products aka HHP), though previous versions have been built by Motorola and Symbol Technologies (Symbol was subsequently swallowed by Moto in another acquisition).

The DIAD V will feature video capability which could provide some additional utility in the capture of the condition of damaged packages (if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth even more!) and will be even smaller weighing in at 1.3 pounds.

To us, this announcement from UPS and Honeywell underscores the power and value delivered by enterprise mobility applications.  Delivering significant information resource to workers at the point of service permits enhanced productivity, reduces overall costs and improves customer experience every time.   That’s why you see organizations like UPS, famous for their ability to analyze and improve business processes, continue to invest in leading edge enterprise mobility technology.

eNom (the large domain name registrar) posted a few Twitter messages this afternoon that addressed the failure of their domain name server (DNS) system earlier today (and which apparently resulted in many web users being unable to access the millions of eNom-registered domain names).  You can read their twitter tweets here.   They indicate that they problem resulted from a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack. 

Unfortunately, we got caught up in the problem as well, and RepairEngine(r) was down for about 90 minutes.   Lexicon’s tech team has since added a couple of layers of DNS redundancy to prevent a reoccurrence of this problem.  Thanks to our users for your patience this morning.

1:01 PM EST — Looks like our tech team has RepairEngine(r) accessible once again. Don’t have all the details yet, but I’m told that we’ve added redundant DNS capability that should prevent a repeat of this morning’s problems.

We apologize for the inconvenience that this may have caused. The good news is that our development/tech teams have taken the opportunity to build more durability and robustness into the web “infrastructure” that supports RepairEngine(r).

12:40PM EST — Unfortunately, we’ve gotten word in the last ninety minutes or so that access to RepairEngine(r) has been blocked as a result of problems being experienced by the large domain name registrar eNom. We apologize for the inconvenience this is causing our customers and expect and hope that the problems will be corrected soon.

In the meantime, please feel free to contact Lexicon by phone at 800.678.1744 for any information or immediate assistance that you may need.