A printing company owner I’ll refer to as Samuel, called me for help solve his problems with 2 digital presses. In his words “the stuff is always broken.”

This saga is still unfolding. Our lesson today, is what is about the definition of Equipment Uptime? I thought it meant how many hours a day equipment is running great. The Equipment Service Performance History Report touted a 95.5% uptime. WOW you think. What’s the problem?

Until I learned that this report measures the time between when a service call is placed and the arrival of the service technician. The digital press could have been out-of-service for hours or days. But Bill, the tech arrived on the scene in 45-minutes.

Samuel only cares about how quickly his equipment will be running, not jamming and producing high quality work. He is not excited that Bill set a land speed record to reach his plant.

Today Samuel and I had a conference call with the Regional Service Director (Greg), the Print Production Specialist and the sales rep for Samuel’s account. They all work for a large national distributor of printing equipment. Bill, the service tech couldn’t be on the call. He was busy  fixing one of Samuel’s  copier.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

  1. Samuel will receive a weekly in-depth service reports on the service problems of the prior week and what corrective action was taken.
  2. The Regional Service Manager will meet with Samuel every week for the next month to review the service problems of the prior week.
  3. Samuel’s key equipment operator will maintain a log of every service call, the problem experienced and the resolution of the problem.
  4. Samuel and Greg will compare the Distributors service records with his own for discrepancies.

DOES THIS SITUATION SOUND FAMILIAR? If yes, stay tuned. I will keep following up on this. I am quite impressed with the commitment the equipment distributor has shown to date help their customer fix all the problems. Let’s see how this evolves.