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Service Depot Failure Tracking

July 12, 2008 · Filed Under IT Service Depot

The role of a service depot is to produce a high quality product that meets or exceeds the needs of the customer. One way you can improve the quality of your products and help other IT departments is to use failure tracking.

Equipment Failure Tracking - Vendors

Your company depends on dependable and reliable equipment to keep the IT infrastructure intact and able to provide services that help drive the business. When a piece of equipment fails part it costs your company money.

When you lose the functionality of the equipment you lose money from sales or productivity. You then have to pay to replace the equipment, ship it and repair it. Purchasing quality equipment from the start is a good business practice, but some vendors cut corners and quality to increase their profits. The Service Depot is where you detect these problems.

When you track why pieces of equipment are failing you are able to spot trends. If these failures become excessive you can go to your vendor and confront them with hard data. If the vendor is reputable and still wants your business they will correct the problem.

For instance let us say a vendor wants to save a few bucks and chooses a lower quality processor cooling fan. After 6-12 months using failure tracking you spot a trend where failed processor cooling fans ranks near the top. Other failures such as damaged processors can be a direct result of the fan failure.

Armed with the data you have collected you go to your vendor and present them with your problem. Since the equipment is probably still under warranty they will see it is actually costing them more money to replace or repair defective parts than they saved by using the cheaper fan.

With good data on failures a reputable equipment vendor should be willing to do the following.

Begin using a higher quality part in future production.
Replace the defective part regardless of the reason the equipment comes to their service depot to avoid future failures.
Provide you with a supply of replacement parts at no cost.
Extend the warranty of the equipment if the failure is due to a defective part they used.

If they balk at this, bring to the table your data in terms of dollars that their defective part has costs your company due to the equipment being unavailable and having to be replaced. Play hardball and tell them that should the issue not be resolved to your satisfaction you will seek another equipment supplier for future purchases.

Equipment Failure Tracking – Service Desk and Problem Management

By tracking the reasons for equipment failures you will be able to provide your Service Desk with valuable information. Pass along any trends in failures and what the symptoms of the failures are. This will save them valuable time in trying to diagnose a problem.

Providing failure tracking data to Problem Management will allow them to develop a work around to the failure. They can combine your data with their trend analysis for a better picture of what is going on. Often your Service Depot is the first to determine the root cause of failures. Passing along this information to Problem Management and the Service Desk allows them to take proactive measures to minimize the effect on your company.

Sometimes you can help determine what the true source of a problem is. For instance Problem Management is concerned about a high number of replacements of a particular piece of equipment. Their analysis indicates the problem is with the equipment. However since you have hands on visual knowledge you can spot issues such as a defective cable that connects to the piece of equipment as being the cause. Rather than replacing the equipment all that is needed is to replace the cable.

What Data to Collect

Collecting data on equipment failures can be easily implemented. Key points of data you want to capture include:

The date
Equipment description
Serial Number (if needed and often useful)
Type of failure (to make classification easier)
A description on the failure

You can use any number of tools to collect the data. I am a big fan of Excel for its flexibility. You can also integrate the data into a database tracking system. Place the collection tool in a common folder where all of your technicians have access to it and train them how to use it.

You do NOT want to track every failure. You do NOT want the data to become overwhelming so that it is confusing and difficult to use. Use a classification system to determine what level of failures you want to track and on what pieces of equipment. Typically you are looking for major failures and failures that cause the equipment to lose functionality in production.

Work with your Service Desk and your Problem Management team to determine what their needs are. This will allow you to provide them with the information they need, rather than what you think they need. Once the system is in place it should be fine tuned to meet the needs of all groups.

In Summary

Equipment failure tracking is a useful tool for the Service Depot and the entire IT Service Support structure. The data collected will be useful for detecting trends in failures that can be of use to your Service Depot, your Service Desk and Problem Management.

The data is useful hard facts when dealing with your vendor trying to get a problem corrected. You should be able to get concessions from your vendor if it is determined the problem with the equipment can be traced directly back to them producing equipment using low quality pieces.

Work with all groups who will use your data and fine tune it to meet every ones needs. Remember you are not trying to replace Problem Management, but assist them. In a smaller IT department, you may be Problem Management so you may want to collect more data for trend analysis.

The most important takeaway is that equipment failure tracking represents another way that departments can help each other. Often communications between groups or departments is lacking. Equipment failure tracking is one way to exploring more cooperation between groups once they see the benefit of sharing information.