Foo - Work Frustration vent

I work in the copy center of a National Luxury Retailer headquartered in Downtown Dallas. I have two Canon imageRunner black & white copier/printers, and a Xerox DocuColor 240 color copier/printer. I currently have orders for color copies/prints in-house totaling over 32k impressions. My 240 just went down. It needs the IBT assembly replaced. Apparently they're only good for 1 million impressions. I have over 5 million on my printer, and don't recall the IBT assembly ever being replaced. Oh, and the DocuColor 240 is only designed to run between 10k & 40k impressions per month. I've already made >62k this month. I've worn out parts that the Xerox engineers say are supposed to last the life of the machine. The tech tells me that he's trying to find an IBT assembly in the area, and also has one on order for me, but the one on order won't arrive until Monday, and it'll probably take him at least a half-day to install it. So there's 2 days of productivity down the drain.

Oh well, back to GBC binding.

I hear ya!

We have a printer for something very specific at work that is only supposed to to 25k prints. We used it for over 100k prints before it broke. Took the techs a month of replacing various parts to figure out why it broke until they simply hit the button on the machine that tells you how many prints it did. Once they saw how many prints we did and that it was 4x the life expectancy, they just said screw it and got us a new printer. I don't mind that we paid for a new printer, but why did it take a month to figure it out!!

Also, our vendor is supposed to have a supply of everything we have at their main office so that our hardware can be replaced same-day, no questions, and it's in the contract. Do they ever have anything we need at their office? Nope. Never. Not once. We are too expensive of an account for them, but we can't change quite yet so...

I am so high on donuts right now, I can't even think hard enough to work... mmmm.... donuts...

Just found out two bits of info:

1. When the tech gets here with the part, it'll take <5 minutes to swap them out. Now he just needs to track one down.
2. My boss is currently looking at getting a DocuColor 8000 (http://www.xerox.com/digital-printing/printers/digital-press/docucolor-7000-8000/spec-enus.html) at a screaming deal of a price, she's just waiting to find out how much the service contract will be.

I found out later on Friday that the needed part is on national back order, and that the next shipment isn't expected until January 31. My tech wasn't going to have me wait over two weeks without production capacity, so he started looking to see if he could source one locally. On Monday I called my boss to have her try to track one down. She found a machine that she could pull the part from in Houston. While I was waiting for a call back from the guy in Houston to tell him how to pull it, the tech tracked one down two blocks from my shop. He finally got me up and running at 5:30pm Monday. So just like I guessed, I lost two days of production.

so much for a paperless society.

You must go though paper by the pallet.

so much for a paperless society.

You must go though paper by the pallet.

I was in a building in downtown Dallas, a bill processing center, and they had big rolls of paper setting all over the place. I'm talking about 4 foot diameter rolls. They had machines with laser printers on one end, and folders and I think envelope inserters on the other end.

so much for a paperless society.

You must go though paper by the pallet.

In a busy month, I go through about 10-20 cases of 20# 8.5x11 and 15-30 cases of 28# 8.5x11. I've already gone through 16 cases (4000 sheets/case) of 28# this month.

Our Superstore goes through a couple of pallets of 8.5x11 20# every month, plus multiple pallets of 36" roll bond.

As for paperless, I did burn & print 60 CDs today for one department. They decided to go with PDFs on CD rather than print the books for the stores. At $1.50/CD vs $300+ per book, I'd have done it, too.

Six hours into my ten hour and I just printed out my 8th piece of paper, it's been a rough nite.

I work in the copy center of a National Luxury Retailer headquartered in Downtown Dallas. I have two Canon imageRunner black & white copier/printers, and a Xerox DocuColor 240 color copier/printer. I currently have orders for color copies/prints in-house totaling over 32k impressions. My 240 just went down. It needs the IBT assembly replaced. Apparently they're only good for 1 million impressions. I have over 5 million on my printer, and don't recall the IBT assembly ever being replaced. Oh, and the DocuColor 240 is only designed to run between 10k & 40k impressions per month. I've already made >62k this month. I've worn out parts that the Xerox engineers say are supposed to last the life of the machine. The tech tells me that he's trying to find an IBT assembly in the area, and also has one on order for me, but the one on order won't arrive until Monday, and it'll probably take him at least a half-day to install it. So there's 2 days of productivity down the drain.

Oh well, back to GBC binding.

Do you have a service contract with them? Do they come in an PM your equipment at regular intervals? If you have a service agreement with them it should be in the agreement.

Do you have a service contract with them? Do they come in an PM your equipment at regular intervals? If you have a service agreement with them it should be in the agreement.

PMs are not covered by our service contract with Xerox for the DocuColor 240, because it has CRUs (Customer Replaceable Units). All the tech would do in a PM is change the drums & fuser. I currently have 6 extra color drums, two black & white drums, two fuser modules, 2 charge corotron cartridges, and one waste container. My tech also gave me a complete set of feed rollers for the paper trays and showed me how to change them. I love my 240. It's the most reliable machine I've ever used in the 19 years I've been doing this. With the Canon 3100 it replaced, if the fuser went bad (for example), the machine would be down for two days: one day for the tech to come out and diagnose the problem, another to wait for the part to arrive and be installed. With the 240, if I have a bad fuser, I'm down for less than 5 minutes.

I was actually looking over our service log and the Customer Expectations Setting document yesterday. According to Xerox, the machine should run between 10k & 30k impressions per month, and with an average of 18k impressions a month, I should expect to have a service call once every 7 weeks. Extrapolating that out, I come up with one service call every 32k impressions. I currently have 5.26 million impressions on it. According to Xerox, I should have had 164 service calls. I've had 67, for an average of one call every 82k impressions. So I'm getting about 2.5 times the expected usage between service calls. I attribute that partly to the quality of the build of the machine, partly to the quality of my service tech, and partly to my own skills/experience as an operator.

Guess whose color printer went down today with the same exact error code as before.

Turns out the "new" assembly had a part on it that was nearing end of life itself. The substitute tech was able to get it back up and running, and my regular tech should be out tomorrow to fix it for real.