May/June 2005

Psion Teklogix's service centre is in southern France, but that doesn't stop UK customers getting top-level service. Sharon Clancy spent a day in Provence finding out how

If your life involved being dropped or thrown about regularly, even run over, there would be fairly regular visits to the doctor to get patched up. Well, during the typical seven- to nine-year life of a ruggedised data capture terminal, few make it through unscathed.

Hardly surprising, then, that Psion Teklogix ranks service as the second-biggest differentiator between suppliers competing in the handheld terminal market.

Why, then, did the company risk an excellent reputation for service support by deciding in 2002 to centralise all its repair and service facilities in southern France - and specifically in Aix-en-Provence? Admittedly, concentrating operations and resources in one country on the European mainland makes perfect financial sense to the multinational company doing it; but for many of its customers, distance from the service centre might appear to imply lower levels of support.

"Centralisation enables us to invest in the facility," explains Tim Marshall, the service support manager who is also in charge of operations at the Aix-en-Provence facility. "And the two million euros we save from not duplicating service centres in different countries can now be invested in other support services."

The need for local contact has not been overlooked, and the company maintains a service support line in the UK. It also employs 12 UK-based service engineers. Their main role, however, is not to do terminal repairs, but to diagnose and fix other problems such as wireless local-area network failures, either remotely or by a site visit. WLAN base stations themselves rarely develop faults, Tim Marshall explains, but it is not unusual for the network to go down because a forklift truck has damaged a cable.

Sick terminals are dispatched to Aix-en-Provence, which employs 57 people in all, 36 of whom are repair technicians. Last year they repaired 40,000 ruggedised terminals and 7,000 older consumer Psion Organiser PDAs, which the company still supports.

All Psion Teklogix units are sold with a three-year warranty, but 90 per cent of UK customers take out a service support contract as well to cover in-service unwarrantable damage. Some customers shy away from SLAs because of the cost, says Marshall, but he points out that the five-day service support contract costs just 5 per cent of the list price of the equipment. "Not much to pay for guaranteed repair time."

There are three levels of service - same-day, three-day and five-day. The figures refer to the time the unit spends in Aix, so same-day is actually three-day, allowing for it to be sent and returned to the operator. For non-service repairs, the turnround time is between 10 and 15 days.

While customers can telephone to book a repair and collection, many use Psion Teklogix's Teknet extranet site. As well as booking a repair, they can also use the site to book a collection, and to check all the Psion Teklogix units they have, plus the location of particular units and repair history.

"The Teknet site gives customers full visibility for their terminals. We also use it to tell them repairs are completed." If a repair goes past its due shipping date for whatever reason, Aix also keeps the UK subsidiary up to date.

All collection and delivery of terminals is handled by Federal Express, which was the only express parcels company able to accept customer collection bookings direct from the Teknet extranet. "That was very important to us, as it made things simpler, and from the customer's point of view it means there is full visibility via Teknet for tracking the parcel as well as the repair."

Once the customer has booked the collection, an image of the shipping documents is sent to FedEx which then collects them and delivers them to Aix the following day,

Hospital treatment

On arrival at Aix, all terminals are given a barcode label containing customer details, service level and repair type. Terminals are scanned at every stage of the repair process, but to ensure that staff have an immediate visual clue to which terminals require urgent attention, units arriving for same-day or repeat repairs are given a big red label.

To save time, units are booked into the system and repairs started before customers actually authorise the repair. "We prefer to do the repair and simply wait for authorisation before dispatching the unit back. It minimises the downtime if a customer is not contactable for some reason."

With over a hundred packages arriving daily at Aix-en-Provence, it can take over an hour just to open all the parcels. One problem is that until this is done, there is no way of identifying which parcels contain urgent same-day repairs. "To get urgent repairs into the process first, we need a quicker way of identifying them," admits Marshall.

He is trialling an RFID tracking system. Customers buy a RFID tag and simply pop it into the package with the terminal. It is more reliable than a sticker, which might become detached. There is a cost, however: £100 per tag for the three-day repair, including carriage. "Some customers are prepared to pay extra for that guarantee of service."

This year, Marshall expects to see 50,000 terminals passing through the Aix repair centre. So successful has the service operation been that the company is now almost doubling the size of the current facility with a 900-square-metre extension. The repair centre itself will move into the new part, leaving space for a European technical support centre, intended mainly for smaller subsidiaries where 24-hour support is harder to provide, and for a central procurement operation for third-party equipment (sales of which doubled in 2004).