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Atricle Dump - The Service Department - Caught in the Middle
Among the first things an entrepreneur would do when he starts his business is to get a logo designed. A well-thought, well-designed logo can speak volumes of your brand and image. Logo design is really that important. Today I got a big surprise at a popular shopping mall located along the East Coast of Singapore).I have not stepped into that mall for ages, and was duly impressed with the revamp. It certainly looked much younger and more hip. Then, I got into the lift. There was this large poster and I was casually browsing it when I saw their logo.I felt that the simple "P.P." logo design (with non-descript font arranged in a boring side-by-side format) was completely incompatible with the ‘feel’ of the mall! I guess I was staring at it a tad too long because a pair of young brothers, around 6 - 8 years old, and their parents started to look at it too. Below is the brow-raising conversation that haunted me the rest of that afternoon:Young Brother: P. P. What is P.P? Sound like going toilet to wee wee (giggle) Older Brother: No, it means no pthui pthui (spitting).You could dismiss that conversation as unintelligent babble of two young kids who could not know better. But you would not walk away from the adults’ remarks without learning on
After years of service work I have observed an anomaly, and if you talk to someone who has been in service work for a long time I believe they will tell you the same thing. The need for a given part will run in threes, you may need a part three times in a row and then not need the part again for over a year! I have always had a problem with stocking procedures that are based on usage. With onsite repairs where the technician carries some parts, it helps when the other technicians know who has what. When I worked doing on site repairs for Eastman Kodak Company, we each kept a list of the parts carried by the other, then if it was quicker to meet and pick up a part rather than drive back to the stocking location, we would do so. We also made sure that someone had at l
How a Simple Packaging Product Can Greatly Enhance Your BusinessModern manufacturers are under more pressure than ever to make their operation run smoothly, efficiently and economically. An increase in the number of competitors, higher supply prices, and a growing emphasis on cost cutting have all led manufacturers to seek new, ingenious methods to increase the productivity and profitability of their business.One such method is lean manufacturing, a revolutionary business philosophy that focuses on enhancing product quality, cutting costs, executing more efficient delivery methods, and employing personnel in the most productive manner possible so as to maximize profitability and performance. Industry giants like Toyota and General Electric have instituted lean manufacturing principles and have realized incredible success as a result.Lean manufacturing employs a variety of tactics from several different departments, all of which contribute to the overall success of an organization. Because the process includes a very heavy emphasis on more efficient delivery models, success within a lean manufacturing environment depends upon products and methods that utilize the most resourceful and useful packaging products.For example, the use of plastic corrugated for
By now you may be realizing that the service department is really caught in the middle, between the sales department and manufacturing. This is a real challenge for the service department. In order to survive we must build a strong working relationship not only with the customers but also with the sales department and the manufacturer or supplier. I would recommend that each employee be assigned to a liaison group by product line to work as a point of contact between sales and manufacturing. This should be at least two or three employees meeting weekly on new products and monthly as the product ages. They should discuss items such as equipment problems, guide lines for upgrades, trade in values, critical parts, and other items that would improve the relations with the end user. It would help if the groups maintain a list of general subjects to go over to help remind each member of problems they have experienced or of information that was given to them by other technicians.
The service department should initiate this process as we have more to gain, (our jobs). The service department should accept the challenge of pulling these four groups together for the good of the company. The service department is usually the point of contact when problems arise. I would recommend that one person in each liaison group be assigned to be the contact person for sales and another person be the contact person for manufacturing, so that each has only one primary responsibility and that they contact their counterpart after each meeting even if to report that there are no problems. This will insure that the lines of communications remain open. If aggressive action is not taken by the service department to address problems and work toward solutions, then others will take action and question the need for the service department. In the future products will not be repaired, but discarded I see this taking place all the time. As an example, I own a very expensive DataScope compass, it started to loose one of the segments in the readout. This is usually a very common problem of a bad contact. The company would not repair, only replace the scope at the dealer cost after the warranty period. The unit was completely sealed and non repairable. I destroyed the unit to discover that I was correct, a bad contact.
The service department must evolve into an information service from a repair service. There will always be a need of more information about products and a point of contact for our customers. We should learn all we can about each new product and become the information point of contact within the company. This information will help now with repairs and later justify our existence when repairs are no longer needed. There should always be a need for a technical person who understands how the equipment works that can explain this to others.
Turn around time
We should always be looking for ways to shorten the repair time. I have already talked about some ways this can be addressed when doing on site repairs, but what about when the equipment is returned to the shop or repair center.
One approach I learned from a coworker in my first year with BARCO Inc., was to go through the repair list each morning and clean out all the easy repairs, saving the harder ones for later in the day, this assured him of always completing several repairs each day. When you work on one unit at a time not moving on until you have completed each repair, you can become bogged down and defeated. It is good to see some completed work each day to feel good about yourself. If you are stumped on a problem, switch off and work awhile on another unit, when you come back to the hard problem something may come to mind to try. However, don't leave the harder units alone for too long before requesting help. Set yourself a time limit to use as a guide for when to ask for assistance.
Lack of parts is usually the most frequent cause of long delays in the repair time. Those who are in charge of stocking parts are always under pressure to keep inventories low and only stock parts that have a high usage and scrapping or returning parts that have not been used in a given time frame.
After years of service work I have observed an anomaly, and if you talk to someone who has been in service work for a long time I believe they will tell you the same thing. The need for a given part will run in threes, you may need a part three times in a row and then not need the part again for over a year! I have always had a problem with stocking procedures that are based on usage. With onsite repairs where the technician carries some parts, it helps when the other technicians know who has what. When I worked doing on site repairs for Eastman Kodak Company, we each kept a list of the parts carried by the other, then if it was quicker to meet and pick up a part rather than drive back to the stocking location, we would do so. We also made sure that someone had at le
I've known too many people who've worked awful summer jobs. I decided it's time for me to step up and show high school students and college students how you can make REAL money this summer without taking some awful, stupid sales job. Or some pathetic waiter/waitress gig where you look like an idiot and get treated like total crap.If you are going to take a summer job, you should settle for nothing less than:- $15-$30 an hour, paid-per-hour. As in, make around a $1000 per week.- a job that let's you pick the hours and shifts you want to work. ALL THE TIME.- a job that you think is fun and look forward to going to.- if possible, a job that gives you the opportunity to become manager within 1 to 2 months.Now, you're probably saying, "Yes! That's exactly what I want. Does it exist? Is it possible to get that?"Yes, it's absolutely possible. But not many people know how. I do know how, and I'd like to show you. I actually wrote a book about a little-known field that only a select bunch of college kids are taking advantage of. But the field is so easy and accessible, ANYONE can do it and make a ton of money at these summer jobs. Technically, you could do it all year round if you want...Now, you are
The service department should initiate this process as we have more to gain, (our jobs). The service department should accept the challenge of pulling these four groups together for the good of the company. The service department is usually the point of contact when problems arise. I would recommend that one person in each liaison group be assigned to be the contact person for sales and another person be the contact person for manufacturing, so that each has only one primary responsibility and that they contact their counterpart after each meeting even if to report that there are no problems. This will insure that the lines of communications remain open. If aggressive action is not taken by the service department to address problems and work toward solutions, then others will take action and question the need for the service department. In the future products will not be repaired, but discarded I see this taking place all the time. As an example, I own a very expensive DataScope compass, it started to loose one of the segments in the readout. This is usually a very common problem of a bad contact. The company would not repair, only replace the scope at the dealer cost after the warranty period. The unit was completely sealed and non repairable. I destroyed the unit to discover that I was correct, a bad contact.
The service department must evolve into an information service from a repair service. There will always be a need of more information about products and a point of contact for our customers. We should learn all we can about each new product and become the information point of contact within the company. This information will help now with repairs and later justify our existence when repairs are no longer needed. There should always be a need for a technical person who understands how the equipment works that can explain this to others.
Turn around time
We should always be looking for ways to shorten the repair time. I have already talked about some ways this can be addressed when doing on site repairs, but what about when the equipment is returned to the shop or repair center.
One approach I learned from a coworker in my first year with BARCO Inc., was to go through the repair list each morning and clean out all the easy repairs, saving the harder ones for later in the day, this assured him of always completing several repairs each day. When you work on one unit at a time not moving on until you have completed each repair, you can become bogged down and defeated. It is good to see some completed work each day to feel good about yourself. If you are stumped on a problem, switch off and work awhile on another unit, when you come back to the hard problem something may come to mind to try. However, don't leave the harder units alone for too long before requesting help. Set yourself a time limit to use as a guide for when to ask for assistance.
Lack of parts is usually the most frequent cause of long delays in the repair time. Those who are in charge of stocking parts are always under pressure to keep inventories low and only stock parts that have a high usage and scrapping or returning parts that have not been used in a given time frame.
After years of service work I have observed an anomaly, and if you talk to someone who has been in service work for a long time I believe they will tell you the same thing. The need for a given part will run in threes, you may need a part three times in a row and then not need the part again for over a year! I have always had a problem with stocking procedures that are based on usage. With onsite repairs where the technician carries some parts, it helps when the other technicians know who has what. When I worked doing on site repairs for Eastman Kodak Company, we each kept a list of the parts carried by the other, then if it was quicker to meet and pick up a part rather than drive back to the stocking location, we would do so. We also made sure that someone had at l
An expense report is the statement listing all the travel expenses of an employee owing to a business visit or pleasure visit. The employee has to fill up the standard expense report of his employer either online or manually and submit it to the authorized Approval Department within a specified time period for claiming reimbursement. The employee has to furnish the signature of the authorized person who has approved his visit. He/she needs to submit all the vouchers and bills of his expenses during his travel like air/train fare, hotel accommodations, transportation expenses, food expenditures and others. It is the responsibility of the employee to obtain the prior approval for his visit from the appropriate authority. The appropriate authority differs from organization to organization, and it will be decided by organization’s structure. The approval authority may sometimes be the immediate boss or departmental budget officer.Once the employee gets the approval from the concerned authority, the company may give some advance amount for meeting substantially higher expenses like travel-fare, or provide an advance for hotel accommodations, etc. However, the employee should not use the advance amount given for travel fare for lodging, conference fee or for other expenses. He/she should
The service department must evolve into an information service from a repair service. There will always be a need of more information about products and a point of contact for our customers. We should learn all we can about each new product and become the information point of contact within the company. This information will help now with repairs and later justify our existence when repairs are no longer needed. There should always be a need for a technical person who understands how the equipment works that can explain this to others.
Turn around time
We should always be looking for ways to shorten the repair time. I have already talked about some ways this can be addressed when doing on site repairs, but what about when the equipment is returned to the shop or repair center.
One approach I learned from a coworker in my first year with BARCO Inc., was to go through the repair list each morning and clean out all the easy repairs, saving the harder ones for later in the day, this assured him of always completing several repairs each day. When you work on one unit at a time not moving on until you have completed each repair, you can become bogged down and defeated. It is good to see some completed work each day to feel good about yourself. If you are stumped on a problem, switch off and work awhile on another unit, when you come back to the hard problem something may come to mind to try. However, don't leave the harder units alone for too long before requesting help. Set yourself a time limit to use as a guide for when to ask for assistance.
Lack of parts is usually the most frequent cause of long delays in the repair time. Those who are in charge of stocking parts are always under pressure to keep inventories low and only stock parts that have a high usage and scrapping or returning parts that have not been used in a given time frame.
After years of service work I have observed an anomaly, and if you talk to someone who has been in service work for a long time I believe they will tell you the same thing. The need for a given part will run in threes, you may need a part three times in a row and then not need the part again for over a year! I have always had a problem with stocking procedures that are based on usage. With onsite repairs where the technician carries some parts, it helps when the other technicians know who has what. When I worked doing on site repairs for Eastman Kodak Company, we each kept a list of the parts carried by the other, then if it was quicker to meet and pick up a part rather than drive back to the stocking location, we would do so. We also made sure that someone had at l
Inevitably, being a technical support contact, you are going to have to speak to a client, whether it's being the first point of contact and they have called you to report a problem, to get more information about a particular problem, or to let them know an issue has been resolved. Unfortunately, in my experience, most technicians do this the absolute wrong way.What's the wrong way, you ask? Well let me explain. For the purposes of this article, I will define a "user" as someone who has between 0 and 10 hours of total training of a particular product. Whether this means that they went to a night course on how to use Microsoft Word more effectively, or they looked at the sticker on their phone that tells them how to get their voicemail is irrelevant; they are not power users by any stretch of the imagination, just someone who knows enough to get by. Also, for our purposes the words "client" and "user" can be used interchangeably.Problem Description: User calls the helpdesk and says "I can't save my document to my network folder."What I almost always hear the technician ask is something along the lines of "Ok, and what server and share is giving the error?" There are so many things wrong with that sentence, I don't even know where to begin.1. As much as it may pai
One approach I learned from a coworker in my first year with BARCO Inc., was to go through the repair list each morning and clean out all the easy repairs, saving the harder ones for later in the day, this assured him of always completing several repairs each day. When you work on one unit at a time not moving on until you have completed each repair, you can become bogged down and defeated. It is good to see some completed work each day to feel good about yourself. If you are stumped on a problem, switch off and work awhile on another unit, when you come back to the hard problem something may come to mind to try. However, don't leave the harder units alone for too long before requesting help. Set yourself a time limit to use as a guide for when to ask for assistance.
Lack of parts is usually the most frequent cause of long delays in the repair time. Those who are in charge of stocking parts are always under pressure to keep inventories low and only stock parts that have a high usage and scrapping or returning parts that have not been used in a given time frame.
After years of service work I have observed an anomaly, and if you talk to someone who has been in service work for a long time I believe they will tell you the same thing. The need for a given part will run in threes, you may need a part three times in a row and then not need the part again for over a year! I have always had a problem with stocking procedures that are based on usage. With onsite repairs where the technician carries some parts, it helps when the other technicians know who has what. When I worked doing on site repairs for Eastman Kodak Company, we each kept a list of the parts carried by the other, then if it was quicker to meet and pick up a part rather than drive back to the stocking location, we would do so. We also made sure that someone had at l
Are you TIRED of Setting GOALS and NOT achieving them?You are not alone! In fact, only 5% of the population even has goals and fewer than that actually put pen to paper and write them down! So, kudos to you for even having the guts to write them in your journal!My intention is NOT to get caught up in explaining the ‘why’ or the psychology behind people not following through with achieving their goals. However, my intention is to preface the following steps to obtaining your dreams and possibly DOUBLING your income.The fact is most people sabotage themselves! “Crazy,” you yell! But, it is TRUE. Am I saying that most people choose to fail? Yes, that is exactly what I am saying! I am stating that we are all free thinking entities that are exactly in the place we choose to be. I am enforcing the notion that your environment and current life situation is precisely what you have asked for and is a direct reflection of your thinking. It is your choice. So…Here are FIVE SIMPLE STEPS to DOUBLING your INCOME…STEP ONE… Decide exactly what you want?It is okay not to know… But, find out! Take the time to slow down and discover what lights your fire. Every successful business person, athlete, scientist, actor etc. started knowing exactly what they wanted.
After years of service work I have observed an anomaly, and if you talk to someone who has been in service work for a long time I believe they will tell you the same thing. The need for a given part will run in threes, you may need a part three times in a row and then not need the part again for over a year! I have always had a problem with stocking procedures that are based on usage. With onsite repairs where the technician carries some parts, it helps when the other technicians know who has what. When I worked doing on site repairs for Eastman Kodak Company, we each kept a list of the parts carried by the other, then if it was quicker to meet and pick up a part rather than drive back to the stocking location, we would do so. We also made sure that someone had at least one part that may be needed if it was not stocked at the stocking location. Some times a unit will be stripped of parts for repairs, the problem with this is that the part may not be replaced right away and the time for removing and reinstalling the part is doubled. Another solution is to keep assembles in stock and replace the assembly when the smaller parts are not available. Technicians will usually start to keep a hidden stock of parts from previous repairs if the parts are not available.
I think that the best solution would be to keep a well-stocked parts department, with every part that would be required. The level of repair that you are performing should determine what you stock, assembles or smaller parts. First stock at least one of every major assembly of the product. The simplest way to accomplish this would be to take a unit and break it down into it's major components. Next, take each component and order the parts that you feel may fail, based on your prior experience. This would be an excellent time to develop removal procedures for assembles.
Factory Feedback
We have discussed some of this in an earlier article. However, I cannot stress strong enough how important this is with the introduction of a new product. I would advise sending your contact person for each new product to the factory for a visit. They should tour the assembly line, take notes, pictures, and collect part numbers to use as manuals until the manuals are available. They should also talk to the workers on the line to find out about any difficult areas or problems they are experiencing.
Now you have a strong contact person who will know who to contact and will have the most impact when a modification is needed. Try not to always send the same person, make sure that each of the technicians experience at least one trip to the factory. If the only person that is visiting the factory is the trainer or supervisor, then you will have only one contact and a large chance that problems will be pushed aside or feedback delayed due to other pressing projects. The technician is the one who is working on the problem and will have the most knowledge about the problem. The factory will also listen more often to the person who is experiencing the problem than second hand information.
The earlier you can have someone involved in a new product, the better, get the jump on the new information and maintain the lead with the information so that the rest of the people in the company will know who to come to when they need help. Discuss with the factory about a time frame for all problems to be reported to the factory. At the start of a new product the factory will welcome all information, later they will want only the problems that have high numbers. Don't be the weak link and fail to report problems. If your company has more than one service center, one problem from you may mean serval reports company wide.
Keeping it Simple
Long reports and reporting forms look impressive. However, they can be time consuming and discouraging for someone who enjoys working on problems. The liaison contact person should describe the problem in their own words and offer suggestions for the correction when possible. E-mail would be the best means of feedback, unless the return of parts is required. Pictures with the e-mails are great. A picture is worth a thousand words, with the cost of digital cameras now below the $100 mark, each technician should have one at the ready on their bench. I recommend one that does not require software and works like an external drive, pictures can then be simply copied to the e-mails and shared. Vivitar has the ViviCam, a 3-mega pixel digital camera that is very small and requires only a USB port, and no software. It can even be used as a camcorder when connected to a computer. Great for documenting even the repairs, more about this later.
I suggest keeping all the repair paper work short and simple, check the tim
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