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Arfa Daily Arfa Daily is offline
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Default Yahama Stagepas-300



"Phil Allison" wrote in message
...

"Arfa Daily"

Then, all of a sudden, the customer comes back to me, and says that the
project has been called off, because their customer, who has a very great
deal of these machines installed in their premises, wants only brand new
boards as replacements, and is not prepared to accept boards that have
been repaired. I asked why this was, and the answer that I got was that
they felt that new boards would be more reliable. No matter how much that
I pointed out that the real life evidence of bathtub curves and infant
mortality, clearly refuted that premise, they were not having any of it.
They seemed unable to understand that a board that has been in service
for a while has passed the infant mortality stage, and is fully burnt in.
And that it is in the main phase of its service life, where any problems
are likely to be random single component failures. None of the parts on
this board were specials, so it could have been repaired to full
manufacturer's spec, using original manufacturer's parts. In fact, the
triac that seemed to be failing could actually have been upgraded to the
next one in the series to *improve* overall reliability.



** You has to supply and therefore warranty the new PCBs ??

Not * YOU * I hope.

I would make the customer purchase all such boards and then you have no
warranty obligation over them.



... Phil



No, I don't have to supply the boards. The whole maintenance operation is
their baby. They were just going to get me to repair the faulty boards that
their engineers swap out in the field, as I already do for many of the other
vending products that they sell and service. I guess they were trying to
save themselves some money over their current practice of buying new
replacement boards from the machine manufacturer. Their customer that uses
the machines in question, is a huge corporate outfit, so I'm willing to bet
that they have a fixed price contract that covers the supply and rental of
the machines with maintenance thrown in. I would further guess that someone
at the supply / maintenance company, who is my customer, worked out that
they could make a lot more money, or better cover their costs, by having me
repair the boards at £xx per board, rather than buying new ones at £4xx per
board, and binning the faulty ones. And then somehow, their customer found
out about their intentions ... :-(

Arfa