June 27, 2016

Regional Service Centers Provide Enhanced Customer Service

With the newest addition of the Wuxi center, we provide enhanced repair servicing capabilities to help our customers strengthen their competitiveness and bring their products to market faster.

Varian Imaging Components has three regional services centers located in Willich, Germany; Beijing, China; and Wuxi, China that serve and support our customers. With the newest addition of the Wuxi center, we provide enhanced repair servicing capabilities to help our customers strengthen their competitiveness and bring their products to market faster.


Increasing Efficiency

Before the three centers were established, customers from outside the United States had to return products to Salt Lake City for repairs or warranty issues, such as upgrades. This created a huge time delay for many customers whose products were caught in customs or international shipping delays. Varian decided that the most efficient way to service customers would be to create regional service centers in sites around the globe where the greatest concentration of customers were located. The Willich site was established in the early 2000s; the Beijing site in 2008; and the Wuxi site, most recently in 2015.

Enhancing Our Service Centers: The Tab Bonder

Initially the Willich and Beijing sites focused on repairing X-ray tubes, but as flat panel needs grew, we added enhanced competencies to both sites to repair panels. However, the growing percentage of returns was for repairs that needed greater technical support, such as the repair of a semi-conductor chip called an applications specific integrated circuit (ASIC). This required a specialized piece of equipment called a tab bonder. Five feet tall and 32 inches wide, the tab bonder is the size of a large printer and enables us to perform the same detailed, precise technical repairs that are offered at the Salt Lake City facility and at all three regional service centers.

In designing the Wuxi site, we integrated the experience and best practices from Willich and Beijing . Wuxi supports X-ray tubes and panels with the most advanced technology and enhancements, including a clean room, environmental controls for X-ray tube repairs and the latest generation of test equipment developed in Salt Lake.

Future Enhancements

Although there has been investments in the Willich and Beijing sites to bring them up to equal capability as the Wuxi site, Varian considers Wuxi a luminary site. Once all of the new technologies and upgrades at the Wuxi site are vetted, they will be employed at the Willich and Beijing sites. Specifically, Varian will be focusing on making enhancements to the Willich facility to increase support for the European market.

In 2015, 10 percent of the panel activity through the service centers was supported in Wuxi. Ideally, we would like to increase this to 30 percent in 2016, with the ultimate goal of 75 percent of the volume in local markets. As we look forward, our goal is to reduce cycle time and further improve our customer experience. We look forward to hearing the feedback from our customers to help drive where we locate our next service center.

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