Back in the exchange business

One BIG part of my job at the Empire is acting as the private escalation team for Logistics:  when they run out of a major part and can’t get more repair stock for weeks or months, they give me lists of customers with open service calls waiting on the back-ordered part, and tell me to call the customers and try to negotiate whole-unit exchanges.  If I can get the customer to agree, I order the replacement systems and then case-manage them until we get to a final resolution.

Getting a customer to agree to an exchange can be harder than you might first think.  Sometimes the customers are corporate IT techs or managers, who don’t like the idea of having to break consistency on their fleets of dozens or hundreds of identical systems just because we can’t get a part, and they’ll totally balk at the idea of having one or two oddballs to have to support.  Others don’t object to the idea of an exchange in the abstract, but they have ancillary parts—docks, car power adapters, monitor stands (which only fit specific docks), and so on—and those have to be exchanged as well.  This can get BLOODY ’spensive if we’re talking about police squad-car docking cradles, which are obscenely pricey, and none of which we make ourselves, so I can end up having to eat more than $1,000 in third-party part exchanges just to get to “yes” on a single system.  Multiply that by a dozen units at a go, and we’re talking about serious money.  Still, there are times when eating a thousand dollars over and above the cost of the system exchange is preferable to having a large corporate customer with dozens of machines down for months on end.  And then there are the customers who just try to chisel you for anything they can get.  Those you just have to sit on, firmly.

The one part that has driven my professional existence this year is the screen for our semi-rugged portable, which is prone to have the adhesive that holds the screen together break down under prolonged heat (like being driven around in a squad car all day for a couple of years) and begin oozing out round the edges of the screen, so our failure rate has been lots higher than it should have been.  We’ve been out of them for months on end, and the manufacturer keeps shorting shipments and making excuses instead of screens.  At any given time since last May, I’ve had fifteen to thirty open cases, with customers waiting two weeks for the factory to build replacement units (and that’s expedited ahead of ordinary-run orders).  But in late October, we got a huge shipment of screens, and Logistics stood me down from issuing any more exchanges.

Until today, that is.  Today I got an email from my contact in Logistics, telling me that we were out of semi-rugged screens again, that we were back on mandatory exchanges indefinitely for LCD issues in that model, and that he’d be sending me a new list of people to call later this week.

Dammit, I was enjoying not having to horse-trade with customers every day.  But I’m back at it, until ghu knows when.  And because, while the exchanges were quiet, I had taken on a couple of other projects that won’t wind up for several more weeks, I’m going to be effin’ buried.  My immediate goal is to survive until the 15th, after which I get to take off until after Christmas.