What is average??

[fixthecopier]

As a surprise, I found a summary of last year on my table. Didn't get anything last year. I used more supplies and parts than anyone else with a total of a little over $36,000 used on contract calls. I also had more completed calls than anyone, with 910. Two other senior techs used $25,000 to $26,000 in parts. One did 500+ calls and the other did about 450. In all fairness, a lot of their calls are on lage and color machines and some calls may take all day. Not having a lot to compare to, I was wondering what parts usage is at other places.

[Stirton.M]

I honestly do not know my field stats....Usually I work on the production machines more often than I do on the little guys, so I may do 2 or 3 calls a day as a minimum, sometimes as much as 6-8 if they are the little guys.

I keep my inventory to a minimum, only carrying feed and sep tires and a few torrington clutches to go with them. Anything else I need I usually make a run to the shop for those...image units, fusers and such...consumables. The larger production machines like the C500 or 6500...parts on an as needed basis I will return to the shop, though I do carry the paper feed assemblies for the LU202 and PF601/602 and a few spare rubbers for the other trays.

A couple PMs a week at a minimum. I have no idea what the cost on all of that is unfortunately. $600-800 for the drum units, another $200 each for the developer, haven't a clue about the dev units themselves when those need to be replaced at 600K intervals, fuser rollers, belts and bearings, 200K kit, charge assemblies...best bet is perhaps $4G per 200K PM cycle.

[mikadonovan]

I have had an increase over the past couple of years on my parts usage also. I attribute this to the fact that a lot of my customers are signing extended maintenance contracts on their existing equipment rather than upgrading to a new machine. These older machines do require more parts to keep them up to snuff. I get a lot of unusual failures that you don't see on machines with less than a mil on them.

[KEVIN900]

I just got my yearly preformance review today ( Don't get me started on that ). And my manager said I spent $49,000 in parts in 2009. He said my parts usage was right in the middle of the pack. Granted, here in New Jersey, you bang out a lot of calls. 5 a day is expected. Some day you need to do more.

[fixthecopier]

What about missing inventory? My shops way of keeping up with parts causes most of this, I was missing $4,000 this year down from $12,000 the past two years.

[Stirton.M]

We are using a crap program called "Great Planes" or some dumbass name to that effect.

This program is CRAP from an inventory tracking point of view. I sign out the part in the parts room. Go to the job site, do what I need, email the workorder to dispatch and go to the next call. Dispatch will then complete my workorder, or try to. If the part I signed out in the parts room was not moved to my personal inventory slot before dispatch tried to enter the data, the program would prevent her from doing this, unless of course, I had multiples of the part already. The program does not allow for negative entries (in anticipation that the inventory would eventually be transferred to my spot). This has led to many many discrepancies.

In the past, we used to use Silk, and though this program was not a GUI, it at least allowed negative entries.

The nice thing about negative entries was that during an inventory check, we could instantly correct miscounted items against those who showed a negative versus a likely positive number in the data base.

Last spring I was apparently 15G out. This most recent inventory, according to this POS program, I am out that much again...thing is, the parts it says I have belong to black and white machines I do not even work on. Parts guy was obviously not paying attention this run around.

[Titan1969]

Wow...we have 1% allowance on inventory errors every quarter ( and the employees meet it!). But we do use a great program and the parts department and technicians work very well to keep it organized accordingly. Ultimately we hold the tech responsible, they should never leave the building( or drop off site without calling the parts department ) if they find an error in their restock

Our B/C techs run about $27 per call
Production $70-100 call...but they do pure production calls all day
B/W $20-$25 per call

[fixthecopier]

I have always told the shop that most of my missing is their doing. Just friday they were saying I had the last of a certain drum. I made them find the mistake and found that when the ticket was closed, it was closed under another techs number. I catch em signing things out under the wrong name all the time. I guess I will have to get a printout of what I am supposed to have every payday and check it.

[bilyahn]

I have always told the shop that most of my missing is their doing. Just friday they were saying I had the last of a certain drum. I made them find the mistake and found that when the ticket was closed, it was closed under another techs number. I catch em signing things out under the wrong name all the time. I guess I will have to get a printout of what I am supposed to have every payday and check it.

Does any of this affect your pay???? I'm an only child (only employee) so I have a lot of stuff in my car and no inventory control to speak of. We track what we spent per account but the boss and I are the only output and I do maybe 75% of the calls and he does all of the sales.

[fixthecopier]

Missing inventory has not been an issue in the past as I have told the owner that I do not have a Bizhub at my house. I have received pay raises in years past when I was missing $12,000 or more. As far as parts used, we do have to explain why we change something that did not go its life.