loans for people with no credit rating<\/a><\/div>\nI 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 \u201ceverything\u201d 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, \u201cWhat happens if you\u2019re in the middle of a job and it breaks?\u201d He looked at me blankly and said, \u201cIt better not.\u201d I thought to myself \u201cBut you KNOW it will.\u201d The piece of equipment that never breaks has yet to be invented. He obviously doesn\u2019t have a plan. Do you?<\/p>\n
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\u2019t fix it, what\u2019s next? The next step is calling the Ricoh 800 number listed in the materials that came with your printer. If you don\u2019t 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\u2019t fix the problem over the phone, it gets interesting.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t have a plan and I learned the hard way. I didn\u2019t know who to call when my service tech left a voice mail saying he had hurt his back and couldn\u2019t 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\u2019t know who else to call. And, \u2026 the worst case scenario \u2026 crisis mode. After living through this, I know what to do next time. Nothing like the school of hard knocks.<\/p>\n
I learned something else too. When equipment reaches the end of its useful life that doesn\u2019t 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 \u2013 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 \u201cshelf\u201d.<\/p>\n
Murphy discovered that \u201canything that can go wrong, will go wrong.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
And from the old archive of wisdom comes this – \u201cExpect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Best regards to all,<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It happens to everyone. You\u2019re 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[12,13],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ceramicprinting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ceramicprinting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ceramicprinting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ceramicprinting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ceramicprinting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ceramicprinting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ceramicprinting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ceramicprinting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ceramicprinting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}