New Life Games LLC
General NLG Chat => Rants and Raves (SEE DESCRIPTION BEFORE ENTERING!) => Topic started by: GOS on April 02, 2016, 04:23:57 AM
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I don't know if I am alone here - but has anyone else experienced the poor repairs made by CERONIX??? They used to be a great deal $45 to repair a chassis - then they went to $65 - still not a bad price IF THEY FIXED IT!!!!. I have had 20 or so chassis repaired this past year - 8 of them had to be sent back!!!! True they FIXED them (except for one that I had to have K-lar repair) but the SHIPPING was a killer. They repaired the obvious (flybacks and an IC) but do not recap!!! You would think that would be part of the process especially with 20 year old chassis). When I asked for some better shipping arrangements - they THREW 6 chassis in a box - with minimal packing - one board was severely damaged - 2 more need repair - the last 3 I haven't tested yet. When I contacted LISA at Ceronix her comment was maybe to find a tech closer to me!!!! What customer service.
One more NEGATIVE - I had sent some older chassis in and got THE PADS ARE NO GOOD - NOT REPAIRABLE - but we do have some new monitors you may be interested in.
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It's the market. For what they pay they can't get good help and to make it worse, you can't find anyone willing to do that kind of work anymore. When TV's got cheap and became throw away items, along with most other electronic stuff, the people doing r3pairs disappeared. Ibthink even the big cell phone companies ship most stuff out of the country for repair anymore. I repaired home electronics for 15 years and got out when I couldn't hardly feed myself anymore much less raise a family. They ought to just quit offering the service because it's only hurting thier image, and thier bottom line
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Or maybe they could offer the monitor circuit board for sale at a reasonable cost, ship it to you so you could replace it yourself. That might take care of a lot of the needed repairs, plus it would avoid the high cost of shipping the entire monitor. If they had a repair place that would repair the boards for them they could even offer you something for your old board, sort of like a core-exchange the auto parts places do on alternators, starters, etc. The manager of their repair shop needs to look at additional ways of offering alternate repair services.
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Most manufacturers these days are non-stocking. Meaning things are built per orders. The business as a whole has changed. Two things have happened. The first is the bean counters got involved and have decided that keeping product in stock is too costly. You have to store it in a warehouse etc. inventory it etc. so you find manufacturers having minimal stock on hand. You also find delivery times getting longer. From what use to be a ship tomorrow to a ship in a few weeks. On the flip side you see mega warehouses popping up all over the country. Amazon is a great example. These warehouses specialize in stocking and shipping product from various manufacturers around the world.
Second thing that has happened is that when a manufacturer makes a run of items, they make a sales projected run. Meaning like 30,000 units. And that's it. It's off to the next model. The chip manufacturers make only so many of a certain part then they discontinue also. So unless a manufacture makes a run of spare boards to keep on the shelf, it will become more and more difficult to get items serviced. My above statement holds true in that they don't want to spend money on a "maybe we will sell these spare boards". Things have gone from component level repairs to board swaps (what we use to call module jockeys, those individuals that would do board swaps) to just buy a new model. I hate to think where all these old products are going. So what you are seeing is Ceronix changing its business model to keep up with disposable times.
Also repair labor is very expensive. The single biggest cost in any company is employees. In my organization we won't even attempt a repair for under $85 an hour and that's on the cheap side of things.
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Slightly Digressing from the original conversation but since it was mentioned - Amazon is the 30,000 pound elephant in the room. Many online suppliers can't compete with them based on scale and volume so they are forced to become frenemies (friendly enemies) with Amazon for their distribution network. I remember dealing with Yamaha as part of the piano dealers association across the country - we would volume buy from the big manufacturers to get the price down then compete at the retail level. The entry level electronic piano had a wholesale cost to us of $270. We retailed it for $450. Costco wanted to sell these so Yamaha created a new model (same model different model number) and retailed it for $250 - who knows what their whole sale price was. Apparently Costcos monthly sales exceeded the piano dealers annual sales. Amazon started selling these for $180 and their deal was even sweeter as they didn't warehouse any of the product and made Yamaha ship directly - I later heard that they had guaranteed Yamaha a certain number of units and paid for 50% up front. It was only then Costco that started yelling foul.
With respect to production runs the display panels in Williams Pinballs started to fail and with WMS no longer in the Pinball game parts became scarce. I had heard that it was Happ that saved the industry by doing production runs of parts If you want to complain about shipping costs... Happ must have a giant wheel that they spin it to determine what you will pay for shipping. I once made a $45 order and didn't click the box to ship everything at once. I got a $58 shipping bill for the first bit, then a $69 bill for the second and a $23 bill for the third and largest box. That's $150 in shipping for a $45 order.
It would be my conjecture that you might be better off getting generic LCD screens and working with someone to develop a video inverter circuit to get the colors right. There is a thread on this here but it hacks the MPU board a bit by changing chips on the PE+. Happ and Certonix both sell drop in LCD replacements but they are around $375. If you were to create that circuit you would sell tons of these things around the world...
With respect to swaptronics I can replace the whole PE+ for $500 or less so buying the drop in LCD for >50% isn't that attractive.
Incidentally to the discussion on labor - my car has some rust on the edge of the hood. To have it ground, repaired and repainted they said 15hrs of work + materials. I think it worked out to about $1650. I found a new aftermarket hood for $110 online, shipping is $90 and 4hrs labor to paint and fit will be around $620. Labor is the killer.