Where to repair – Onsite or specialist centre?

You are in the middle of your busy work schedule for the day and your mobile device goes down. It’s always a pain but what’s the best way to fix it for your business and productivity? We are often asked if we carry out onsite repairs – and we can – but often it’s simply much better to send the device to our specialist European repair centre. It sounds counterintuitive, I know, but there are a number of good reasons why.

According to research, less than 10% of repairs are carried out onsite and these are mainly software and simple hardware repairs. The chief reason being that it’s often not possible to ensure you have every component element to hand for an onsite repair - imagine the size of the vehicle required to carry all the components for our range of rugged devices! - or to guarantee the quality of that repair. That’s why TOUGHBOOK devices are better supported at our repair centre.

By their very nature, our rugged devices are complex and by repairing them at our centre, we can ensure that devices are looked after by a range of specialist technicians. As the manufacturer, we can ensure that every repaired TOUGHBOOK has fully passed our rigorous test and quality standards, ensuring that it’s returned in a fully functional ‘as new’ condition. Repairing onsite across Europe wouldn’t enable that range of experience and quality guarantee to be brought to every TOUGHBOOK repair. In reality, onsite repairs also take longer, are more costly and have a high probability of not fully solving the problem. This can result in further delay, as a replacement device often then has to be issued – meaning further delay and cost to the customer.                                     

Replacing can be complicated

In addition, it’s important to remember that devices often have a variety of different generation models and simply replacing the device is not always the best fix. For example, if a second-generation device cannot be repaired and is replaced with the latest generation model this can lead to additional challenges for the customer and its IT department. These can include the need for different build images and different operating system versions that can cause application and accessory compatibility issues.

We believe repairs are best carried out at our European centre to ensure the devices are repaired in the best environment possible to minimise the chances of further issues down the line. Shipping devices back to our European repair centre, with our standard 96-hour turnaround time or 24-hour Rapid Replacement Service, is the most efficient and effective solution for our customers. And with over 600,000 units being actively supported across Europe, we have built up an incredible library of knowledge and insight that continues to speed our repairs. For example, our configuration and service centre holds the configuration history of every individual device shipped. We also log and analyse every repair to spot any trends or issues and feed this back into the design and manufacturing process to continuously improve the reliability of our devices.

Occasional road trip

But for those rare instances where nothing will beat an onsite visit from technicians, we will of course be there for our customers. I still remember the happy faces of the technicians chosen for a road trip to several customer sites across France. Our technicians love an occasional road trip but generally the repair centre is still the best place for those rugged devices in need of expert care.