How many brands are you expected to be good at?

[banginbishop]

ricoh,canon,kyocera,hp,sharp,lexmark (authorised dealer for all) and any other crap that comes in. The reason is "get your foot in the door and a chance to upgrade to one of ours" Which is why I dont mind occasionaly dropping a service or parts manual off to someone who find themselves in the same predicament.



oh I didnt say i was any good at any of them

[kingarthur]

it's not a case of how many brands....but how many different types, cos i live on a small island, there aren't many techies, 3 in our company, as the senior tech, i get the "pleasure" of being asked to go & repair anything different that comes in, so in my time with this company (34 yrs) i've fixed adding m/c's & calculators (including pocket), cash tills (mechanical & electronic), intercoms, pricing guns, bursters, decollators, shredders, laminators, folder insertors, franking m/c's, copiers, printers,colleagues VCR & DVD players, their wives hairdryers, CCTV,faxes,binding m/c's..i'm sure i've missed something out.....basically whatever they "throw" at me..i'll try to fix....many a time i've attended a customers office never having seen the equipment & not knowing how to work it...in these situations, i ask the customer to show me what they were doing when it went wrong, then once i've seen them operate it, i now know how to work it...

[Max Kilby]

All of them.

Me too.

Last training I had was in 1996.

Things have moved on a bit since then and while I consider myself pretty good I do struggle a bit on some of the later machines.

Me and my colleague work well together bouncing ideas, but we work for a guy who was a tech years ago and remembers how a tweek here and there can fix anything and it's just not like that these days. We are expected to do more and more with less and less. The pips are starting to squeak!

I heard a story the other day on the radio where a guy was talking about investing in your staff - he said the only thing worse than investing in your staff and them leaving to work somewhere else, was NOT investing in your staff and them staying......

Makes sense.

[ledoux]

Sharp is our main line. We also do Kyocera and Canon. I've worked on Ricoh, Konica, and Mita in the past. After you've been doing this for while the trepidation of walking in on something you've never seen before fades. I was kinda lucky in the fact when I started in this business I was 18(31 now) I made my way up from delivering and Parts/Warehouse manager and didn't just get thrown in the field. I got to spend a lot of time in the shop with guys working on trouble machines. That was invaluable to me. But I will say no matter how much shop time you have it's so different in the field. I was still a nervous wreck for the first month of field time even though I had been working on them for probably 4 years at that point. I've recently transitioned more to the IT side of things and kinda went through the same thing for the first month or so. The copier business has been a wild ride but a fun one.

[Shadow1]

I work directly for Ricoh (might as well say Ikon now, and we're going down the toilet just like they did, too), but they still want to pick up service on other brands to transition them to ours - I get stuck working on anything nobody else wants to touch... Started calling myself everybody's "miscellaneous bitch."

That mostly means Lexmark and HP. Copiers and printers don't scare me - once you understand the basic principals the details don't matter nearly as much as most people think. It's the oddball stuff that gets irritating - ever swap out the carriage drive belt in one of those oversize inkjet printers HP calls a plotter? It can be interesting, and the boss invariably wants to know why it took 3 hours, when you didn't even know to bring in the Torx screwdrivers.

[RRodgers]

It is very scary. I can remember the first time I worked on a color machine. There were techs in same company who refused to learn them.

So do those guys still have jobs?

[jmaister]

Doesnt it get confusing with many brands?

Do you have moments where you were to fix something but hours later EUREKA!, you found that you are deeply meditating on the wrong brand?

Just curious, I may have to learn multi brands too.

*dunno if i have enough RAM for it tho LOL

[Venom]

[QUOTE=Shadow1;296692]I work directly for Ricoh (might as well say Ikon now, and we're going down the toilet just like they did, too), but they still want to pick up service on other brands to transition them to ours - I get stuck working on anything nobody else wants to touch... Started calling myself everybody's "miscellaneous bitch."

I know the feeling, when I worked at Ricoh I called myself the "Village Bicycle" because everyone rode me

[blackcat4866]

Doesnt it get confusing with many brands?

Do you have moments where you were to fix something but hours later EUREKA!, you found that you are deeply meditating on the wrong brand?

Just curious, I may have to learn multi brands too.

*dunno if i have enough RAM for it tho LOL

Sometimes yes, confusing. But most times I can mentally categorize. The major difference between brands is service mode and way of executing adjustments. Once you've got your head in the right place, it all clicks.

When you're thinking about theory, or copy process, there are only so many engine types and all the same rules apply. =^..^=

[mjarbar]

As an update my answer should now be 3 as we have ditched Samsung (we are still supporting the ones we have in the field just not selling them any more) but have now taken on Oki printers and MFP's.

Would still like to take on our sub contracted Ricoh's to bring them in house.