When you need repair services, Factory Repair of your equipment gives you not only repair services utilizing new parts, but also testing of the equipment in Factory test cells to assure that they meet Factory specifications before they leave the Repair Lab. Indramat (now Bosch Rexroth) doesn’t sell components to ANY third party repair house, so we leave it to your imagination (and/or nightmares) what they use to fix your Indramat. Every Indramat Drive leaves with either a 1 or 2 year warranty (2 year for REMAN), and with the assurance of showing up in Factory packaging with Factory seals showing.
Some third party houses claim to be “Certified” or to use “OEM parts”. Things you should know before believing this.
- There is no such thing as a Certified Indramat Repair Station or Company. They don’t exist. This is a LIE.
- Use of OEM parts is the same thing a junkyard can claim. If you get a alternator off a 130,000 mile old Ford, that is an OEM part. The fact that it is used up before you install it is beside the point.
- Indramat is used in industry because it is reliable. And it is USED, not driven to the market on Sunday by a little old lady. Salvage parts are just that. Salvage. They should be used to reclaim precious metals, not to try to get you past the warranty period on a substandard repair.
- Bosch Rexroth doesn’t sell new internal components to ANYONE. PERIOD.
- If you have 3rd party repaired items in your system, and you call for a service engineer, they will take one look at it and turn around and walk out. You are still on the hook for the trip.
We also hear the “We send it off to Indramat to get it fixed” claim as well. Some folks do actually try, but we refuse to repair equipment from 3rd party repair houses. We get calls on this multiple times a week. The reason is twofold. 3rd party shops claiming to repair Indramat should be allowed to fall on their face and pursue another way to make money, and we have documented evidence of at least one 3rd party house that would take repaired units, and then strip them down to try to repair multiple other drives. We know this because the boards are serialized as well, and we saw them coming back in with either failures or incompatibilities from idiotic repair attempts.
Your plant being down can cost 10s (or 100s) of thousands of dollars an hour. Third party repairs are a unknown quantity, at best a bandaid that might run a year or an hour or a minute (or less), they typically are cheaper, but if you divide the cost by the value received, even one buck divided by zero is infinity. That’s a steep price to pay for being down.
We have a client, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty. All of this client’s US plants know us, and use us. But the Corporate offices have a company wide policy to utilize a 3rd party repair house to fix drives and motors to save money. The plants know us because we keep REMAN EXCHANGE units on the shelf (largest inventory in the world) for immediate shipment. So when they go through all 3 drives on the shelf, none of which work, they then call us and have an Exchange drive flown out at the single highest cost for transport we have. Then they do it again the next month. And the next…