Introduction
Globally, the focus is shifting more and more to sustainability and being CO2 neutral. This has actually always been one of mt unirepair’s pillars. To take this to the next level we increased our R&D department and started looking for local sources to buy our components, which are needed to fix the defective parts in repair.
The challenge
We were facing a lot of delivery issues, because of several reasons. For example, some suppliers were not sticking to lead time agreements, the European government introduced more strict rules for importing metal or aluminum or the quality of the delivered parts were not according to our quality standards.
To overcome these component issues, we started buying our components more locally and at original suppliers, to cut out the middlemen. Because of buying the components at different suppliers, we faced the challenge that some of the components are not the complete assemblies we were used to receive. This means now we had to create our own sub-assemblies.
Challenges we faced:
- The biggest challenge was to keep at least the same quality as before, but preferably higher, to ensure less defective parts in the field.
- Finding the correct suppliers, relating to the usage of the correct materials, with the same specifications, then the ones from the original supplier of HP.
- Creating tests to check the assembled components.
The solution
To ensure 100% quality of the assembled components we have a dedicated team working on these tasks. This became a cooperation between our purchasing department, R&D department, operational department and quality department.
Because of this cooperation we are able to create the components with an even higher quality level then we ever received from the original supplier. The managed to do this, by having a very thorough testing environment, to mimic the printing presses, in which these complete spare parts are operating.
The result
This project and afterwards fully developed process, resulted in several positive changes:
- Less transportation distances. Before a lot of these assemblies came from outside of Europe.
- Faster repairability.
- Support our customer more.
- Even higher quality, as we are now controlling the quality. High repair quality is actually one of our major strengths.
- The creation of these components was such a success, we even became the supplier for other repair centres on different continents, repairing parts for HP.
All above improvements are strength to our mission and vision!
