It happens to everyone. You’re first job for a customer who can bring you a lot of future business and the production deadline is upon you. Things are all going to plan when disaster hits. Your printer goes haywire. Days pass as the usual corrective measures fail to solve the problem. Time to call in the service people. Another day passes as they take their usual 24 hours to respond. But, next day comes and goes without a visit – the service tech assigned to you is sick.

Another day passes and you’re now just three days from needing to ship everything. The replacement technician finally arrives and discovers the part needed has to be ordered. Another day goes by and the costs are going up up up as next day freight, service time and parts costs are all adding up. And all you can do is wait, and hope that the customer’s deadline can somehow be magically extended.

I visited a sign shop recently and the owners had just replaced three pieces of equipment with the latest and greatest $150,000 flat bed printer which does “everything” he needs. It took up the space of the other printers and most of his shop. The new printer is a beauty. It has all the bells and whistles and does everything faster and better. He loved the fact that most of his production could now be completed on one piece of equipment. I asked the owner, “What happens if you’re in the middle of a job and it breaks?” He looked at me blankly and said, “It better not.” I thought to myself “But you KNOW it will.” The piece of equipment that never breaks has yet to be invented. He obviously doesn’t have a plan. Do you?

First and foremost, accept the inevitability of your equipment breaking. You know that it will. Your first call is simple, always call us first. We can often get you out of the jam but, if we can’t fix it, what’s next? The next step is calling the Ricoh 800 number listed in the materials that came with your printer. If you don’t know where those materials are, go find them and keep them in a handy place. The folks who answer your call are generally experienced and only get that job after a number of years in the field. If they can’t fix the problem over the phone, it gets interesting.

The people on the 800 line have the responsibility of scheduling any necessary on-site service visit from one of the local Ricoh Field Service people. Do you know your Ricoh Field Service Technician? If not, then your emergency will be no more important to the tech than any other call on their log. Find out in advance who your tech is and get to know them. Invite them to visit and show them what you do. Invest in building a relationship with them and ask them what the procedures are for getting the fastest help. If your tech is unavailable for some reason, what is the backup plan? For your piece of equipment, what parts are stocked and what parts are not stocked? How long does it take to get the non- stocked parts and is it possible to add more of them to the spare parts inventory? You get the idea. The objective is to know what you will do before you need to do it.

The background for this blog has come up recently in our shop. I can give you this advice now because, like the guy with the new sign printer, I didn’t have a plan and I learned the hard way. I didn’t know who to call when my service tech left a voice mail saying he had hurt his back and couldn’t come out. And we were desperate to finish a job for a company that can bring us a very large amount of additional business. And when no one answered the central call number I didn’t know who else to call. And, … the worst case scenario … crisis mode. After living through this, I know what to do next time. Nothing like the school of hard knocks.

I learned something else too. When equipment reaches the end of its useful life that doesn’t mean every component in the device is at the end of its useful life. Upgrading to a new replacement printer may be less expensive than the price of repairing the old one. I had this experience as well. We use Ricoh printers for both ceramic decorating and also for our conventional office printing (we are Ricoh dealers so no surprise there). About 6 months ago our office printer failed in the middle of printing several thousand pages for a mailer. My service tech told me it was going to be about $1200 to fix it – all four toner pumps failed at the same time. A new Ricoh SP C430DN cost about $1500. I bought a new one. The old printer is now a treasure trove of useful spare parts. We just harvested the fuser assembly to replace the one in our ceramic magenta printer. Our time to repair the next time we have a breakdown will be short because we have parts on the “shelf”.

Murphy discovered that “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” Too often we discover on our own the corollary to that rule from Murphy, whatever goes wrong will go wrong at precisely the worst possible time. Have a plan for that and your recovery will be less costly and less time consuming.

And from the old archive of wisdom comes this – “Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.”

Best regards to all,

Ron