BER Costs

BER, Beyond Economical Repair, is the loose term for anything considered not to be worth repairing and, for many it stirs abject fear, annoyance and occasionally outright frustration.

It creates fear of losing money on a call for almost all repairers as, if the appliance truly is BER, then often traders don’t get paid or don’t get paid much to have to callout, investigate, diagnose and often report on the fact that the machine is goosed.

It creates fear when you get authorisation to go ahead with such a repair, having to hope that you actually did price it right, you ordered all the parts needed and that you actually have the time to muck about with what is almost certainly a complex repair.

From the latter also comes annoyance, knowing that the repair should never have gone ahead in the first place and, should you find that there are other faults, further fears and worries about losing still more money on something that is just an annoyance.

All this simply leads to frustration at a system which is so weighted against the repairer that it is just staggering to think that we let other companies run our businesses and make commercial decisions with our money without so much as a by-your-leave. More often than not in my experience, there’s little if any consideration for your opinion which should count for a whole hell of a lot given you’re on the ground and can see the machine, but no, it appears to be merely a financial choice made by the company requesting the repair. Pretty stupid system when you stop to think about it.

To be honest I actually struggle to recall the last time that I was actually asked the opinion of the engineer or myself other than the odd time from Servevast who are actually very reasonable in these instances. Often they have (with Smeg UK) organised a replacement where we’ve said that it wasn’t worth the grief, by the same token refused to exchange where we’ve advised that the customer was having a laugh with them. Now that’s being reasonable and sensible, it’s also showing a spirit of working with the agent to common goals. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s good customer service and maybe part of the reason why Smeg products are so popular these days from being virtually unknown only a decade ago.

My apologies to DAG in advance, I know you guys read these pages and I am not having a dig here, quite the reverse, but it serves as a good example of where I’m going here.

I actually stumbled upon a classic example the other day which amazingly has come from Domestic & General and I have to stress that this is very unlike DAG from experience, but it is a worry. We had a call for a Beko fridge freezer, the pot was totally goosed with burnt out coils and, from the information from the customer, it seemed as if the machine had been acting up for a while. The engineer (who has been a refrigeration engineer for 30 years) concluded that there was very likely a choke in the system which led to the pot getting stressed and burning out. This seemed a very logical and reasonable deduction to make to me. Apparently not to DAG’s claims department.

It transpires that, for the first time I can remember since doing a bit of semi-commercial work, that the DAG claims advisor or technical chap expected us to go back to the customer’s house and flush the system with nitrogen! After explaining that we didn’t use nitrogen and that it only had a rough 30{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} chance of clearing any blockage, this chap was still insisting on carrying this out and expressed that “we should have had this to try it”. Interesting however that he still hasn’t phoned the customer back to explain his thinking on the matter. Also interesting is that the same claims dept. has refused to pay for the extra visit and materials to carry this out telling us, in effect, that this is expected as part of the deal. Funny, I don’t recall the deal involving me relinquishing DAG of it’s exposure to costs, but I digress.

So I had Craig ask if they expected us to do all this, very likely find out that the machine was BER and get paid £30 for two visits, lockrings, gas and whatever else was required. They said yes. I didn’t think that was very fair, I still don’t and have not agreed to do it.

We were also never asked if we used nitrogen.

The upshot was that we were expected to make the second call, with a compressor bought in at our cost to try to save the machine. If it was BER, we lose. Big time!

Should the matter go much further I will take it up with Lyndsay Moore who will resolve the matter, but that’s just the way of things with DAG, the problem will almost always be put right whatever happens and it’s nice to know that.

But as you can see, already this one call which is really a BER call, has cost way in excess of the payment for the visit and the time spent faffing about on the phone trying to explain that it’s simply not worth the hassle. So we’ve already lost money on it, even without the extra visit and all the materials. Even it was to be successfully repaired it would have cost way more than we get paid to do it and, I do mean way more!

Which leads to still further frustration with the silly systems employed these days. You see, I think before the accountants wrestled control from those in the industry that actually had a bit of mystical power known as “common sense”, we actually got a higher rate for these types of jobs. That has slipped in the past decade or so but, from the repairers point of view, it was a stupid, stupid mistake. In fact, from the insurer’s or manufacturer’s point of view it was a stupid, stupid mistake too.

Now what we do when we come across a hard job that’s not worth doing we simply throw everything at it as we get penalised if it’s not repaired on the first visit and then we get penalised if there’s a recall on what is almost too often a complicated repair. So, in order to cut costs (or losses) we don’t bother. We just overestimate the job and take the reduced fee as that’s the lesser or two evils. We lose if the job goes South for whatever reason as the burden of risk is placed upon the repairer and, we lose if the machine is BER. Apart from which we lose if we get all the bits, go back, do the job and it turns out there’s another unforeseen problem, one that we often couldn’t see until we’d done the first bit in which case we get stuffed with the cost of the spares (or cost to return them if that’s even possible) to do the first part.

Really not a fair system when you look at it in the cold light of day is it?

Doesn’t really encourage a repairer to repair does it?

Not exactly an environmentally friendly way to do business is it, producing more landfill or needless replacement of spares as part of a “belt and braces” policy?

Think about it. Most BER rates sit about the £30, apart from GBDAR who really take the wee with the absolutely scandalous half fee nonsense, so that £30 covers the cost of the visit for most people… just. But to go back and repair the best you can hope for is £50, but the vast majority sit at £38-42 these days. However, since another visit costs £27 to make it means that the repairer is in an instant loss situation on labour and those losses do not include the cost of admin time reporting, pricing and whatnot.

It could be argued of course that the repairer makes it up in spares margin. This to an extent is probably very true, but even on a call using £100 worth of spare parts you’d be lucky to clear £20-30 as almost all will be non-returnable special orders, that’s why we didn’t do the damn job in the first place and we still have to cover all the risk of warranty for that. Not exactly an appealing idea.

The worst of this is that it is a situation not of the repairer’s making. We didn’t come up with the stupid policies that almost all manufacturers, but especially insurers and WP’s have come up with, we just have to operate them in the real world and not on a spreadsheet. But by the same token we have to mind our own costs as well and try to survive as well as make a profit from what I consider in many cases to be “waste of time jobs”. Where it is made not possible to make a decent living or profit from the system we have to find a way or we simply do not continue to survive.

One manufacturer I know of came up with a blindingly simple and obvious way to save a lot of refrigeration, simply pay a £100 labour fee on any cabinet that the agent saved from being replaced. That is roughly about half the cost of replacing the unit and so a considerable saving. But then the accountants got involved and common sense was binned in favour or a spreadsheet, spreadsheets by the way cannot apply common sense just yet and nor it would seem can many accountants.

Just think how much good that would have done the likes of EAC never mind us.

Just maybe this is another subject that some within the industry to should go off and have a long think about as the policies in place by most people in a futile attempt to save money is actually costing them far more than they perhaps realise.

So, BER, maybe it should actually stand for Beyond Economical Reasoning?

K.