Can Outsourcing Product Repairs To Your Vendor Improve Your Bottom Line?

Tim Becerra, executive VP for business development at Posiflex, talks with Business Solutions magazine President Jim Roddy for an exclusive interview on the benefits of outsourcing product repairs to your vendor.

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Length: 10 min, 56 sec

Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Tim Becerra, executive VP for business development at Posiflex, and Jim Roddy, president of Business Solutions.

BSM: Tim, I know exactly where you stand on this subject. You recommend that resellers send the product back to you to be repaired. Can you talk about the pros of doing this? What case do you make to a reseller who's still making their own repairs?

Becerra: When asking resellers to send their terminals back to Posiflex, the goal there is to have an authorized and certified Posiflex technician repair the terminal, put it through performance tests, and return it back to the VAR with peace of mind that we're also going to look at other areas of the system and address those proactively. I want to extend that further — in addition to sending the terminal back to Posiflex, that would be one component of an Advanced Exchange process that we recommend that VARs take advantage of.

Posiflex has priced this service at a very low rate so that our VARs can either pass it through at cost to the end user to have an insurance policy on every terminal deployed. Or they can add a little mark up to the end user and sell it as a premium service. Even if they’re passing it through at cost, there's still a reduction of cost related to overhead and creates more efficiencies in the model because VARs are now managing the hardware in lieu of performing "open-heart surgery" on a terminal and doing transplants with one part to another to make a terminal whole.

Harkening back to my experience in the industry, over 20 years, I would literally walk into my office in the morning and pull up five service calls. Two of those calls were local; three of those calls were remote. And, hopefully I would have a whole terminal on the shelf. If not, I would cannibalize my terminals and test those, and get three prepared to ship out, and then I'd run and do two local service calls. Under an Advanced Exchange Program, I could walk into the office, pull up my five calls and because all of my terminals are covered, my base terminals on my shelf for service are whole because they’re being transacted through Posiflex or your hardware provider.

So I would immediately take three terminals off my shelf, I would send those out to my remote locations, and I could take two terminals off the shelf and do my immediate local calls. Or I can get online with Posiflex and say, "Posiflex, I want you to overnight three terminals to my remote customers, and I want you to send two terminals to my location because I'm going to address those out of my own service pool."

That's a very efficient way to manage your service.

This is only a portion of this exclusive interview. For the complete podcast, go to the media player at the top of this page.