Improve Symbol repair and Intermec repair turnaround

Filed under: Barcode Scanner Repair, Announcements

What do piles of broken Symbol, Intermec or Zebra printers, scanners, or pdt’s mean for your distribution center, shipping operation, or manufacturing plant? Yes, hassles & headaches. How about also downtime, lost opportunities, increased costs, and oh yes, valuable management time that now gets spent to manage (read: “monitor”, “follow up on”, or even “chase after”) the necessary repair & maintenance service work.

Wasn’t this equipment bought to make your operations run smoothly? Barcode and RF on the front end of your MRP or WMS was going to help put your operation way out on the right side of the performance bell curve – right?

Barcode Scanner Repair When Breakdowns Happen

Don’t blame the hardware. If you have deployed top products like Symbol PDT6846 or Symbol MC9060 handhelds or the Intermec T2425 or Intermec CV60 terminals, you bought tough durable devices. The Zebra 105se or Intermec 3400 label printers are awfully hard to beat day-in and day-out for reliability.

But breakdowns are inevitable, even with great quality, robustly designed and built gear from Symbol, Intermec, Zebra, or even HHP or Datalogic. And when this happens, Lexicon believes the key is end-to-end “repair process efficiency”, which means eliminating periods of inactivity or wait time from your repair cycle.

Barcode Scanner Repair: A Metaphor

To illustrate this insight we ask if you’ve seen the television ad that Kaiser Permanente, the health care provider debuted during the Olympics they call “Community Bicycle”? It’s really a great spot and you’ll see that Kaiser’s point is that, like the bicycle being passed from rider to rider, good health can be spread throughout the community in the same way and everyone benefits.

We got inspiration from the piece – first, for its intended purpose, and as it relates to repair systems, designed for efficiency. When you watch the ad, pay special attention to the bike. You’ll notice that it doesn’t stop for long. When one rider gets off, another gets on; interludes that occur when the bike is at rest are few or non-existent. That bike seldom “waits around” for a rider – it’s on the move to somewhere all the time.

Lexicon's Barcode Scanner Repair Philosophy

We believe that same philosophy works in the efficient design of high volume, scalable repair centers for barcode and enterprise mobility equipment. Turnaround time leadership (or improvement) is derived from installing strict standard processes that keep the “bike” (the broken scanner or printer or pdt) on the move. Processes that don't permit equipment in need of repair to be placed in a “wait” state, or at least limits these non-productive, non-value-added “wait” conditions as much as possible.

Don’t overlook the power of eliminating non-productive “wait” time in your own processes and operation. You can start by getting that pile of broken Symbol scanners and Intermec terminals for repair on the move right now.