Its always tough to know what course of action is best and how much time to devote to one machine until you have already spent some time diagnosing the problem. But time and experience as well as taking the experience of others can help build procedures that will allow you to predict most correct courses of action and how much time to spend on them.
The fact is that you are running a business and you must treat it as a business. You want to provide service but you also have to make money to make a living and for your business to grow. You can't treat the business like a starving artist - just doing it for the love of it.
There has to be a balance between service and revenue. Spending too much time on service at the expense of revenue is just a path to a slow death. You don't want to find yourself one day looking back and saying "we bent over backwards providing great service and trying to satisfying the customer, so why am i out of business?". Your customers will be wondering the same thing too!
When business is slow and there is no backlog, you can afford to spend more time on one machine and even experiment with new and different repair/removal techniques and chalk it up as R&D. But when you have a backlog, you simply can not afford to spend all of your time on one machine. As long as parts are not required or not required to be shipped, I typically return a machine within 24 to 48 hours. Thats when you need to have a plan/process/procedure in place for servicing machines.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes disinfecting a machine can turn into a quest to slay the dragon! There is a great sense of satisfaction when the last monster has been stabbed through the heart. However, and obviously, the more machines you can fix and get out the door per day, the more money you make.
Though we are a small business, we try to maximize revenue while maintaining quality of service by having a multitasking process in place.
1. We currently have 6 service stations in place and we try to keep them all occupied.
2. We expect each in-shop tech to be able to service a minimum of 3 machines at the same time.
3. When a machine is assigned a station, the tech sets up and initiates a backup of the system drive onto our backup server then moves on to the next station. This affords us the opportunity - if needed - to change gears without shooting ourselves in the foot with respect to restoring the clients system, factory image or data.
4. Priority is given to setting up and initiating any required processes on machines that will take a while to complete but require periodic interaction.
(while our techs are knowledgable and we have an arsenal of diagnostic and repair apps and scripts on the server - that we got off the net btw - we still utilize the experience of expert and enthusiastic people on the net to help solve problems. It's a tremendous resource! I can't tell you enough how much time and money we have saved utilizing it.)
5. Every type of repair has a procedure. The tech round robins the stations applying and checking off each step of the repair process noting any unexpected problem or issue that needs to be resolved until a machine is repaired or has exceeded the normal amount of repair time.
6. If a machine is kicking the techs' butt, It's removed from the station for review and the next available machine is put on the station for repair. We don't want to slow down the repair queue any more than necessary. Once the issue with the problem machine has resolved and repair can continue, the machine goes to the head of the queue and waits for the next available station. In cases where the repair is going to take longer than what the customer expects, the customer is informed.
7. Once a machine has been dubbed repaired, our quality assurance tech, usually performed by the same or a free tech, performs a quick system check to insure the machine has been fixed before it leaves the station.
8. The process repeats with step 3.
