Alexander Korolev, Technical Director of Agrotrade Company LLC
Sooner or later, the owner of agricultural machinery has a question: where and by whom to repair it? Contact a certified technical center, a third-party company, or entrust the issue to your native machine operator?
Quite often, priority is given to the latter option: after the expiration of the warranty period for equipment, its owners try to carry out scheduled maintenance and repair work by the forces of “their specialists”. Many are sure that they will cope with all problems no worse than dealers, because earlier, in the days of collective farms and state farms, all these issues were resolved “on the ground”, on their own.
Indeed, once every farm had its own good repair shop, and well-trained machine operators and mechanical engineers worked with the equipment. But even in that era, the most technologically complex operations were performed in service centers. Yes, and the machines were arranged much simpler.
Over the past couple of decades, technology has acquired intelligence, on-board computers have appeared that have taken over almost most of the operator's functions (and this has reduced the requirements for user professionalism).
But agricultural universities cannot afford such machines: the base of educational institutions is obsolete, the level of training of machine operators and engineers has dipped. Let's add to this the laziness and disregard for work, which are characteristic of a significant number of farm employees (especially for seasonal workers, they are generally killers of equipment). Taken together, all these factors provide a natural result: we break something that, in principle, should not break. The main causes of accidents: they didn’t replace or lubricate in time, or they lubricated wrong or wrong ...
According to the general opinion of specialists involved in the repair of both imported and domestic agricultural machinery, serious breakdowns in 90% of cases occur due to unprofessionalism and incompetence of enterprise workers.
How is a do-it-yourself repair going? For a leisurely conversation, smoke breaks, anecdotes. Farms suffer enormous losses due to downtime. Why does the situation repeat itself year after year?
The heads of agricultural enterprises most often voice two reasons why they do not enter into an agreement for the maintenance of machinery and equipment with technical centers of dealers:
- Dealer maintenance and repairs are expensive;
- the technical center is far away, too long to wait.
Let's calculate what the client pays for when contacting a service center.
The final price of scheduled maintenance or repair by the SC includes the cost of consumables, spare parts, specialist labor and transportation costs. In fact, the client overpays only for the work of a service engineer and transportation costs. Manufacturers of agricultural machinery sell original consumables and spare parts only through dealer networks; in any case, all this will need to be ordered.
Paying for the work of a specialist, in return, the client receives a firm guarantee that everything that needed to be inspected was inspected in the car, what was needed and in the required quantity was filled in, everything that was required was cleaned and replaced. And if we are talking about repairs - that all work was carried out according to the manufacturer's technology, using only original spare parts.
Bonus: repairs are carried out in the shortest possible time. The service center specialist is interested in doing everything as quickly and efficiently as possible so as not to return to the farm for as long as possible.
Now to the issue of time. In cases where a customer of the service center breaks down equipment, the technical center is obliged to help him. But if the farm does not have a service contract and seeks qualified help at the height of the season, it may be denied assistance or (more often) moved to the end of the queue, because the priority of the technical service will always be repairs under warranty and contracts.
Anyone who has encountered a similar situation will confirm: the cost of annual maintenance at an authorized service center is in any case less than losses from possible equipment downtime.
Of course, there is always one more repair option left - from a third-party master. Here the client is attracted by the cost, but you need to be sure that the master will not deceive: he will not force him to replace what was not required to be changed; will not supply counterfeit, used or equivalent. The difference in the cost of original and non-original spare parts is significant. But such savings never pay off. At best, the element will quickly fail. At worst, a spare part from an unknown manufacturer will fail unexpectedly and something else will break because of it.
Summing up, I will emphasize once again: questions concerning who and how will maintain and repair agricultural machinery are always decided only by its owner. And he is responsible for this.
If the farm has warm, specially equipped hangars, qualified specialists work, it can independently carry out scheduled maintenance and repairs. If there are no such conditions, you should rely only on the help of professionals.