New E* Repair and Refurbish center

[bhelms]

New vs. refurbished?

Sometimes refurbished is a better bet than new from the reliability standpoint! Consider that in the solid state world most failures are "infant mortalities". The MTBF on a lot of SS equipment is so long that it becomes obsolete long before it reaches its ultimate wear-out failure mode. So a unit that is slightly used (and presumably not abused!) has actually had a bit of an extended burn-in period. Thus I would expect a lower probability of a return on such a unit for (another?) defect since it's past its infant mortal period, which is perhaps the first 100 hours of normal use.

Now, this same reasoning does not necessarily apply for any unit with a HDD or other highly-stressed components, and certainly does NOT apply for "intermittencies" that were not fully diagnosed and mitigated in the refurbishment. Unfortunately a lot of returned gear is never really "repaired" or fully checked-out as part of its refurbishment!

Too bad we can't selectively choose refurbished units from E* or D*. I for one am a willing participant in the acquisition of truly refurbished equipment for the reason above, especially if there is a cost incentive...!

 

[Van]

Sometimes refurbished is a better bet than new from the reliability standpoint!

This is not the case with E equipment, trust me when I say that where ever the current refurb units are coming from they are doing a horrible job of making sure that they actually fix the problems. Until E impliments a procedure for the techs to include paper work that states what is going on with the device inquestion and it stays with said device then they will continue to have a high rate of return on B.O.B. refurbed equipment.

 

[Stargazer]

Hmm, I wonder if they will pay for the upgrades on the prepaid programming boxes that they just recently came out with when they go to MPEG-4. I wonder if the replacements will be HD compatable.

I will back Van up on this. This is DEFINITELY not the case with Dish Network equipment. Many others will back us up on this as well. Their refurbs are so bad that I have had some instances (and so have others) where the receiver would have to be replaced three times before they got a good one that works. I even had one technician on the phone tell me that Dish does not send out bad boxes and said that she would personally test this one to make sure it was not bad. Sure enough it actually wasn't. Boy was she mouthy!!! Anyways refurbs have a MUCH higher failure rate. My distributor tells me that they refuse to sell them because of how high of a failure rate that they have.

I would think with all of the shipping costs that they would see that it would be cheaper to send out a new unit than a refurb. There must be certain parts that they are not seeing that is going bad that is a common problem with the receivers.

At 20 million receivers even if that one place was handling all replacements with their 1300 workers, that would be 42 receivers per worker per day average. We know that not every receiver goes bad and we know that there are two other centers that do the repair. If there are three times this many workers that would be 14 per worker per day if all the receivers went bad. This is not counting the receivers that go bad multiple times and the switches and lnbf's though.

Do they really think it is cheaper to higher more people to fix the poorer quality receivers than to spend more money to make better quality receivers? Do they even figure in the amount of churn as a result of their product going bad and how much they lose based upon that? What is Directv's rate of failure compared to Dish Network's?

 

[Van]

A big problem with the refurb and repair centers when they get the equipment is that there is no paper work indicating specificaly what is wrong with the equipment. For example lets say a dpp-44 switchs sat port 2 does not show a connection, its taken out of the system and sent back by the tech to his warehouse, the warehouse staff fills a pallet with this and other defective parts, does a manifest shipping sheet, and off it goes to a hub location wich in turn ships it out to the refurb facility. At no point is there any paper work that tells the repair tech what is wrong so he or she must find the problem and fix it. The problem with this is that in some cases the problem is intermitent and will get missed as the repair techs just like the installers have only a set amount of time allocated to each unit.

I saw a video last year of one of the repair facitlities and those guys dont spend really any time thoroughly investigating the equipment, they would pop a receiver on to a rack and plug in test feeds to diagnostic gear and do a quick once over and pop it back out, it didnt make me feel confident to say the least and explained alot as to why there are so many bad refurbs in the box.

 

[Tom Bombadil]

I floated the 20M number, but it is probably higher than that. Maybe 25M.

And then there are switches and LNBs.

So there would be a lot of repairs.

With a churn rate of 1.5% or so per quarter, that would be over 700,000 people a year leaving Dish. They may be shipping back 1.4M receivers and probably that many LNBs. This would be a lot of equipment to check out before it is shipped to the next customer.

The 1300 workers would include a lot of people in receiving and shipping, parts inventory, order processing, training, human resources, etc. I guarantee there are no where near 1300 worker bees fixing equipment.

 

[dishcomm]

http://biz.yahoo.com/bizj/060601/1296350.html?.v=1

bizjournals.com
EchoStar bringing 1,300 jobs to S.C.
Thursday June 1, 12:37 pm ET


EchoStar Communications Corp. will employ 1,300 people at a new repair center in Spartanburg County, S.C., the satellite TV company announced Thursday.
Jobs will start at $8 an hour. The site will employ technicians, managers, test engineers and other support staff.

The facility will be the company's fourth repair center. EchoStar already has similar sites in Denver, Atlanta and El Paso, Texas.

The center is expected to open by the end of the summer, an EchoStar spokeswoman said.

EchoStar (NASDAQ: DISH - News) is the second-largest satellite TV company, with more than 12 million subscribers nationwide.

8 bucks an hour...That's E* for ya. Turn over there should be minimal.

 

[dishcomm]

I am surprised that dish has not shipped all these jobs to india like there call center????Anyway having my dish installed back in decemer I never looked at the paper work.But under close inspection my LNB,s are refurbished as is the DP34 switch.And dish told me I would be getting a new system!!!!The Dp34 switch died and I have alreday replaced that.What next the LNB's.But I would rather have the dish over cable any day of the week.

Liitle secret..Lease custs are not entitled to New EQ..In fact most leased EQ is Reman....Here anothe secret...Take the reman stuff..it's better..Why? Because it has been restored to original specs..Good as new..but the EQ unlike new EQ of the line, the raman stuff has been inspected and tested....

 

[Tom Bombadil]

I'm going to take the comment that turnover should be minimal at $8/hr as sarcasm.

In my business we start part-time repair techs at $11/hr, full-time entry-level staff at $14/hr.

 

[dougruss]

If its a lease and you return it that way they will charge you the original retail price for it.

Not Leased.........Owned.

 

[Van]

Take the reman stuff..it's better..Why? Because it has been restored to original specs..Good as new..but the EQ unlike new EQ of the line, the raman stuff has been inspected and tested....

Im sorry but where do you get this at? the reman stuff that comes from E is largely crap and I can show you about six thousand or so dish techs that feel that way, one thousand field service managers that feel that way, a few million customers that feel that way as well. If you put five remanned DP34's and six remanned 311's on my van I will almost on a garauntee bring back two of the switch's and 1 - 3 of the receivers because they wont work as required and this will be on a daily basis. I've had fellow techs roll on a job and go through three 311 remans on a single job that were bad, had other techs go through two 811 remans on a single job, maybe your getting new gear confused with reman but there are more than enough people out there that know just exactly how bad E's refurbed gear really is.

Oh and lease customers are entitled to new and or used, the csg work order cover sheets say use reman equipment where available, it does not say that that is the only thing you must use.

 

[Stargazer]

The only time refurbs are better than new is if they are tested as they should be and a problem is actually found and repaired as it should. Then you know you have a good machine.

I personally think that there are certain issues with these receivers that are common. If they would simply replace the most common issues by swapping out the parts in all of those receivers then that would eliminate a lot of the issues.

One thing that they could do to ensure that the receiver does not have an intermittant problem is to put a bunch of them in a place that moniters the problem and detects whether it lost signal or something went wrong over a longer period of time. Once a batch has been tested and monitered by the computers then they can put the next batch in their place and fix the intermittant problems.