"Our printer is down!" - What You Need to Know about Onsite IT Equipment Time & Materials Repair Service
Filed under: Announcements
A.J. Mast for The New York Times
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 few analogous highlights to be aware of: first, recognize that if you don't have a pre-paid maintenance or support agreement of some sort in place, you can expect to pay a flat fee of some amount for a qualified technician to travel to your site and diagnose the problem. If the technician is not able to repair your dot matrix line printer or thermal transfer label printer for example, on the first call and has to come back, you shouldn't have to pay that diagnostic flat rate again, but you will have to pay for labor and any parts.
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.
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