Rapid Prototyping Equipment Financing
Factory Maintenance And Parts:
Looking Ahead While You're Looking After
If you want an RP system to hold as much value as possible over the years, you have to take good care of it and you have to also make sure the next person to use it can take good care of it, too.
The first part of this double-barreled notion is something you already know: You must arrange for an RP system to have proper maintenance.
There's more to this than just paying the service costs. The vendor's policies and practices can have a very dramatic impact on the residual value of an RP system. You have to understand how the vendor behaves, because a system won't have much residual value unless the next user of the system can get proper maintenance, too.
We're going to break this issue down, because there are a few points you've got to watch:
- You need assurance that spare parts will be available to a subsequent owner at the same prices paid by others,
- You need assurance that the system will be eligible for factory maintenance when it has changed hands, and that this maintenance will be done at the same price and under the same terms and conditions provided to other owners of the same type of system, and
- You must find out if there will be charges for installation, inspection and re-qualification of the system for factory maintenance when ownership is transferred. If possible, find out what the charges will be . . . or at least what they are right now. Then you can see how large they are compared to the likely future worth of the system.
So, there's a lot more to preserving the residual value of a system than just signing a factory maintenance contract. And not everyone prefers factory maintenance, as we explain in the next section.
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