- This topic has 6 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 16 years, 2 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
What is the situation regarding parts changed for in warranty work?
I have a fair few faulty parts stored up.
Do you want them back for the insurers or can i just bin em?Steven
Re: Faulty parts
For the moment Steven the only thing that we’re particularly interested in is PCB’s.
Most other things suffer some form of physical damage that’s easy to spot, barring the odd motor.
But, of the PCB’s we have gotten back, only about 30{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} (sometimes less) actually have a fault on them. We get grief from the factories and insurer about the amount of them that are needlessly changed and, I hate to say it but, they often tell us that it is therefore obvious that some people either don’t know what they are doing or are just guessing at the fault. You can kinda see their point of view even though we try to defend the engineers.
A good example is the 10’s. Of the control boards that we’ve gotten back and I have to stress there’s not been many, there has proven to be less than 10{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} of all used actually faulty. That doesn’t paint a pretty picture for the agents.
K.
Re: Faulty parts
I can get their point, yet most of our washers are so basic there is nothing left on it, so automatically if it doesnt do a particualr thing then after checking the obvious many of us would opt for a board.
I trust you would also tell me that if i returned a board and it wasnt faulty. I would like to know honestly.
Mistakes and incorrect diagnoses happens to many of us; but at the end of the day we are not making any money from the parts, we are just trying to put right a fault.
Hopefully we are all honest enough to own up and say I cocked up, if it was something else.
I would not send a board back knowing it may not be faulty. whats the point you may as well keep it for another job. :rolls:I suppose we think if a motor or the armature has blown a segment badly to save time we would probably order and replace the board as you dont want to return to a customer without being able to complete the job, thats why maybe, boards being returned are found to have no fault?
Ken do you check the boards yourself when there returned?
By the way what are the cost of our pcbs?
Have we got a trade price list for all the models available yet, people do ask when out of warranty what is the price of…. it would be nice to have a comparison.
Steven
Re: Faulty parts
Yup, but it’s a guess and that I suppose is the point that’s being made to us by insurers. 😉
We don’t, unless we have a reason to do so, bother looking at where the return boards come from as it’s not important, what is important is knowing and understanding why it is automatically assumed there’s a board fault. Fix the cause, not the symptom and I’m most certainly not even remotely interested in a witch hunt over it, unless of course someone’s being really stupid.
Mistakes on diagnosis are a given, it happens and we all just have to deal with it. What we get grief about are so many calls where you see multiple parts being replaced that they know are the engineer taking a guess, module and inverter card or motor are a classic example. But, I get the same grief from DAG about other brands as well as they seem to be on the warpath about it as well so I think it’s just a general thing.
It is very, very rare that a board is returned that hasn’t been used.
It is also, on most of the top mounted PCBs like ours, incredibly unusual for the board to be affected by a motor failure. In fact the board will likely report that.
I don’t check them, they run them through at least one clean cycle to test them, in situ. But, usually a quick spec test is sufficient and any that we have sent out after testing have never been returned, so we know they weren’t faulty.
The 2 PCB is cheap as chips, the trade price is only about £15. From there you go up the way with the 555 and 10 boards being the most expensive. Many I haven’t priced in the same way as the 2’s as they’re not out of warranty yet and I don’t know how the pricing will change between now and when that happens.
The AW23 board, as an example, will probably be about the £60 mark as things stand presently. It’s more expensive because the LCD unit on it adds a lot of cost. The 10 board and, this is purely from memory, is likely to be about the £80-100 mark.
So, on the 2’s we don’t get a lot of grief about it as the cost isn’t really that significant but you can see that on others, it is and when it’s replaced and either doesn’t solve the problem or there’s other parts required (especially major ones) I get grilled as to why. Couple that with the low failure figures we have and those from factory, all of which the insurer has and you can see why they go into a strop over it.
I do think that you raise an interesting point though with the motor example. It would appear and, I’ve seen it myself often, that some people will take a “belt and braces” approach to the parts ordering up more than they actually need, just in case. Trouble is are they even bothering to change one part and return the other (the answer is no BTW so far as I can see) or are they just fitting them all in a scattergun approach?
K.
Re: Faulty parts
Its typical like any insurance company deep pockets and short arms.
The point made about D&G and other service providers I think that it down to rates of labour with them.
Because we all get screwed by these people on labour rate you automatically cover your self by ordering several parts especially if you have had to made a 1 hr round trip and its your second visit, with the lack of service information etc you have already lost out before you begin. You hope for a BER if not then you know you can surely fix it next visit.But this then leads engineers to think this on every appliance.
Everyone gets tarred with the same brush.Its not quite the same with our ISE as we have more knowledge on them, excellant back up, they are usually local and easy to fix. The rates of pay are excellant. :tup: :tup: but mistakes do happen to best of us. 😳
There is always a reason why the board go, but i guess many of us have had to tell the odd porky in the past for eg you know full well its being used commercially but if you tell the insurance co you didnt get paid and you certainly was no chance of getting money from a customer.
Like you said before if the guys are honest and tell you the real reasons, then as long as they are not taking the p**s then in most cases there will be no issue.
Steven
Re: Faulty parts
Yup, I totally get it where there’s no info or support but, as you rightly say, that’s not the case with ISE usually. There are times when there isn’t an answer but it’s not too often I hope.
I also totally get the belt and braces approach when the labour rate is low.
What I think is missed a bit is that we will almost always back the agent. If you tell us a machine is being abused or misused in some way we will back that up for you, fully.
I’ve had a couple where the attending engineer has sent in photos (a digital camera is a must have tool BTW) which provides evidence that customers simply cannot argue about. It is well, well worth carrying one as it’s saved my skin on a few occasions, it also kills a lot of hassles from a customer. All you have to do is tell the customer that you’re going to take photos of the fault and general machine or installation to get technical advice. If they kick off when you do that and refuse, well, they’ve nowhere to go then have they? 😉
K.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.