Effectiveness of Arrangements

There are quite a few alternatives which are found to exist for maintaining instrumentation – in-house staff, instrument suppliers, specialized Government Centres and Private parties. The choice regarding use of any of these options depends on location of user, competence level, cost effectiveness, complexity of fault, etc.

Predominantly, use of in-house facility is extensively made for common & simple card level faults. These simple faults though occurring frequently are not the measure of importance of the fault to uptime. A large percentage of users were found to be satisfied with this kind of in-house services. Since the maintenance is mainly at first & second levels and since between 40% to 50% were doing it in-house, the satisfaction expressed by their maintenance staff could be blased. However, this is not an indicator regards complex break-downs.

Next to in-house maintenance, many of the users (40%) are also dependent on suppliers for maintenance especially for critical types of instruments. The users perception of suppliers services is not entirely satisfactory; especially where locations away from metropolis is concerned. While large manufacturers of major brands have branches or agents from where technicians can be sent to the site, small & medium manufacturers resist or delay such actions.

Independent services to carry out maintenance are now emerging as a small business. These independent service providers possess adequate expertise to maintain a variety of instruments. Being small outfits, they contain their service territory to the zone around their location. Further, they confine their services to a limited class of products where they have past experience. Thus, to the limited clientele, they ar perceived as giving satisfactory service.

It was found that the approach by parastatal institutions for providing servicing & maintenance support to a wide variety of instruments has been erratic and inconsistent. At present, there are 2 Government agencies namely CSIO and DOE who have set-up full-fledged facilities for providing R&M services to industry. There were originally nine such centres set-up by CSIO (which have now been paved down to three) and about 13 centres by DOE operated through State Electronics Corporation.

These centres appear to be operating in an unviable fashion and there is a question as to their continuance in the new atmosphere of undertaking only self-sustaining activities. It is to be noted that only 3% of respondents admitted to having used services from these centres. These respondents were mainly from non-industrial user category.

Qualitative discussions with a wide spectrum of industrial respondents indicated the following points:

•   neturally skeptical of government services

•  UniUnaware of the existence of such service
•  Were not approached to know of their requirements
•  Gempressed by the lengthy procedure
•  Recipients were critical of delays in servicing

Thus government service centres need to improve their operations considerably to find wider clientele on a commercial basis.

In addition to above mentioned centres, several educational institutions like IIT’s, Major Engineering Colleges, even Physics Dept. of Major Universities and Laboratories under Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) specialized in certain areas of expertise have been helping from time to time with R&M of instrumentation when they are approached and pursued. Since these institutions do their own in-house maintenance in any case, they have the wherewithal and expertise to tackle at least some of the R&M problems. However, since they have other objectives to fulfill, they do not volunteer nor seek other maintenance tasks. Naturally, they do not equip themselves with spares other than standard components. It may be possible to make use of these facilities and expertise with proper coordination, augmentation, for wider coverage of providing R&M services.