Problems and solutions: what can go wrong with the maintenance of complex iron

Image: Patrick McConahay , Flickr

Retail is an area where a large number of technologies are involved and the most different equipment is used. The infrastructure of large retail chains can be envied by any IT company. Despite its “offline” industry, the industry is actively developing technologically, which is promoted not only by high competition, but also by changes in legislation - for example, until July 1, 2017, all stores will have to switch to online cash registers that send data on all purchases to the tax through the Internet .
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Considering all these factors, there is an acute issue of equipment service maintenance - in today's article we will talk about how this process can be organized, and what difficulties the business faces.

What is the problem

In the field of retail, a huge amount of various equipment is used: for example, POS-terminals, barcode scanners, cash registers, self-service systems. Often, solutions are integrated with more familiar to any IT specialist ERP-systems and databases.

The larger the store or distribution network, the more difficult the infrastructure becomes, and the more difficult it is to organize its service for reasonable money for business. Finding a company that knows how to work with complex equipment from the retail industry is not so easy.

Here are the possible options for organizing service available to retailers today.

Gray repair

Historically, many Russian companies, in case of need for repairs, do not use the services of equipment manufacturers or their certified service partners, but turn to "gray" companies. Such service centers, as a rule, do not have certificates from equipment manufacturers, and their employees may not have very extensive experience with a particular iron.

Sometimes service companies, which initially provided more traditional services to the retailer, such as repairing office equipment, are also attracted to such repairs. If such a company in the course of its development begins to work with specialized equipment, then it can be trusted with something besides PCs and printers. However, the competence of such companies is questionable, while the “gray” service centers themselves do not have access to high-quality spare parts.

With the help of gray repair companies can really save on the maintenance of equipment, however, the risks of problems seriously increase. For example, last year one large Russian retailer decided to optimize the cost of servicing its equipment and repair it in a gray service center. As a result, the partner company, due to the lack of knowledge and experience with specific systems, was unable to carry out repairs within the allotted time, and the cooperation ended in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit for non-compliance with the deadlines. At the same time, the equipment that had to be in stores “yesterday” had to be promptly replaced. Foreign trading companies, as a rule, do not want to expose themselves to such risks, so they are trying to envisage in the budget the costs for repair and support of the infrastructure using a “white” service.

Warranty repair

As in the case of any other equipment, in the field of retail there is the concept of warranty repair - for a certain period of time, the manufacturer guarantees the uninterrupted operation of the equipment. If during this period something breaks through no fault of the user or people or companies associated with it, then the vendor is obliged to repair or replace the product at his own expense.

Here all the usual limitations of such repairs remain:

a business should often transport a broken device at its own expense and here geography often plays against business - most vendors in the field of manufacturing retail equipment have representative offices only in Moscow, St. Petersburg and a couple of other major cities;
The number of spare parts in the warehouse is calculated as the “average temperature in the hospital”: the vendor analyzes the number of breakdowns for the reporting period between the purchased lots (not more than a couple of times a year), and imports a limited number of spare parts. Such problems affect both foreign equipment manufacturers and Russian, creating their devices on the basis of spare parts imported from abroad;
even with the necessary spare parts, repairs can take a long time - it is almost impossible to clearly understand when the device can be used again;
warranty repair means that the user will receive a device that will be “as new” - this means that all data from it will be erased, you will have to restore them yourself;
if the equipment is broken by the fault of users or, for example, during transportation, then it will have to be repaired at its own expense.

In cases where repair is delayed, and a working device is needed right now, buying a service contract can help.

Service contracts

In the past few years, the practice of purchasing service contracts has gained popularity in the Russian market. Such a document is a manufacturer and buyer of equipment, it describes in detail all the possible conditions for the provision of maintenance and repair services.

Even if the device fails due to the user's fault, the manufacturer will have to fix it - if this condition is in the text of the contract. Also in the document is usually prescribed and the time to fix the breakdown - so the business will not be left without the necessary equipment until the conditional 48 days stipulated under the guarantees expire.

These are unconditional advantages of service contracts, but they also have their limitations. The first one is their price. The size of the service contract can reach 30% of the cost of equipment, these costs need to be budgeted at the stage of buying the necessary hardware. In addition, most manufacturers use for calculations not rubles, but dollars or euros, therefore currency risks arise.

As a result, many companies refuse to use service contracts. According to many managers, such agreements are not obligatory - a breakdown may not occur or not require replacement of equipment, but a large amount will still have to be paid for the contract.

To make service contracts more attractive to end customers, many manufacturers expand them with the help of integrator companies.

Extended Service Contract

Authorized integrator companies can also provide services under a service contract — it is more convenient for vendors to shift these tasks onto proven specialists, rather than having a large staff of engineers and a considerable amount of replacement technology, which is given to customers for the period of repair of their equipment.

In addition, the integrator can expand the contract with its own services (these are the services that Pilot provides ). For example, if in the case of a standard contract, the manufacturer responds to the request for replacement or repair only on working days from 9.00 to 18.00, then the service partner can offer round-the-clock support, as well as take on logistics and service documentation.

In addition, an extended service contract may involve not only fixing broken equipment, but also data recovery. For example, if in the data collection terminal (TSD) information about the inventory was stored before the breakdown, then after the service repair, the device’s memory will be cleared. A partner integrator can make a commitment to preserve and restore the database that was current at the time of the breakdown. For the implementation of such work requires highly qualified specialists, and often these employees are not in the usual gray service centers.

What to choose?

In matters of service maintenance of complex equipment, a business is always forced to find a compromise between costs and possible risks in the event of breakdowns or improper repairs. In their experience, large retail companies have come to the conclusion that it is better to plan in advance for the costs of fixing possible breakdowns.

Small and medium-sized businesses often follow the path of creating their own IT department and maintains a certain number of backup copies of equipment, involving external experts as necessary.

Both options have the right to life, the main advice here is that before you entrust your own equipment to a service partner, you need to understand whether he has experience working with him. The best way to understand this is the availability of current certificates of service partners of vendors such as Fujitsu, IBM, Huawei, Lenovo, Toshiba, Zebra, HP, Cisco. If they are not there, then it is likely that the service may bring no less problems than the failure of the device itself.