Mercom Helps Self Maintainers
March 5, 2014
It’s fairly common these days for large companies to self-maintain IT hardware, at least to some degree. This trend seems to apply to companies in a wide variety of industries including Retail, Hospitality, Insurance and Manufacturing. Sure, you don’t really see CEO’s repairing their own iPads, but many companies have their own Technicians who can troubleshoot and repair hardware problems to different degrees.
And there are good reasons for this trend too. Enterprise wide hardware investments are very expensive, and it delivers some comfort to know that company employees are able to maintain and ensure that critical hardware is working when you need it. Also, once the warranty period has expired, maintenance support from manufacturers tends to be very costly. Many manufacturers view out of warranty repairs as an excellent profit source.
However, there are some limits to what an in-house maintenance team can do. For example, one major retailer that Mercom works with, pre-screens and performs basic repairs on all defective hardware. Their small group of Technicians receives and checks all incoming equipment from over 1,000 stores. Any equipment that tests good is put back into their pool of working equipment, but anything that is really defective is shipped to Mercom for repair. This includes a range of printers, monitors, keyboards and barcode scanners.
Another emerging barcode manufacturer has their own in-house repair group, but during busy times they keep their repair times down by outsourcing repairs to Mercom. For more than three years they have depended on Mercom to deliver dependable and timely repairs on their scanners, handheld devices and circuit boards.
Another Mercom customer has their own group of Field Technicians who will troubleshoot and hot swap defective devices at thousands of locations in North America. The defective hardware is then sent to Mercom for repair and refurbishment and then is sent back into the field for re-use.
So, whatever level of hardware self-maintenance suits you, Mercom is able to and flexible enough to supplement it with quality and cost effective depot repairs. We’ll take care of it for you!
