Convincing arguments for outsourcing medical device maintenance, calibration and repair services

The ability to capacity plan medical device maintenance, calibration and repair services is a familiar problem.

If you’re a medical device OEM, asset health is crucial because your customers rely on your equipment’s performance to avoid the impact of lost clinical time.

Moreover, as a supplier to the health sector, you know prevention is better than cure. So ideally, you want to diagnose asset issues before they occur.

Given the sector in which you operate, maintaining quality and safety standards is vital to delivering after-sales maintenance, calibration and repair services. 

In particular, you want to control spare parts and replacement devices. Also, maintain transparency throughout the process to maximise customer satisfaction.

But what if you don’t have the in-house capacity to deliver regular maintenance, calibration and repair services?

Or find yourself needing to divert resources to an important project?

Here’s where a field engineering service partner can help.

A field engineering service partner helps medical device OEMs scale up their after-sales service operations to provide regular predictive maintenance, calibration and repair services and deliver an outstanding customer experience.

Let me explain how this works.

Account management

You’ll be assigned an Account Manager to determine your needs and ensure you achieve the goals set out in your service level agreement.

Your Account Manager will ensure the availability and readiness of engineers with the knowledge and experience to maintain and repair your assets.

As a result, you can be confident that your outsourced field engineering service partner will deliver an outstanding customer experience on your behalf.

Scale up your team with medical equipment engineers trained by you

You can expect your field engineering service partner to scale your team with engineers who understand how to access and work in clinical settings and are familiar with the protocols needed to handle medical equipment.

Of course, to look after your equipment to your specific expectations and to be able to diagnose problems, your partners’ engineers will need to be trained and accredited by you.

Planned preventative maintenance 

According to McKinsey, predictive maintenance can reduce machine downtime by 30%-50% and increase machine life by 20%-40%.

Elsewhere, according to the NHS, unplanned maintenance costs quickly erode any savings hospital departments make.

With this in mind, your field engineering service partner will work with you and your customers to schedule preventative maintenance so your customers can plan downtime to minimise patient impact and maximise clinical time.

Calibration services

A field engineering service partner can save you time by scheduling and carrying out routine calibration to keep your medical equipment in optimum condition and ensure assets deliver accurate results.

Repair centre services

Here’s the thing. It’s unavoidable. In highly pressurised environments, sometimes equipment breaks down. 

Whatever the cause of the breakdown, know that your field engineering service partner can organise a repair at a fully equipped repair centre under the watchful eye of highly trained and experienced technicians.

For this reason, a field engineering service partner can reduce downtime and get your customer up and running quickly.

Let’s recap

The ability to provide regular preventative maintenance, calibration and repair services is essential to medical device OEMs who want to deliver outstanding customer service.

However, suppose you don’t have the in-house resources to deliver regular after-sales preventative maintenance, calibration, and repair services. 

Or, you need to divert resources to another project. In these cases, a field engineering service partner can help.

When you work with a field engineering service partner, you’ll get a service-level agreement built on transparency and trust. 

Also, an account manager who’ll ensure your partner will meet the terms of your service level agreement.

Better still, you can extend your team as and when you need, with a footprint of engineers trained by you.

For this reason, if you’re a medical device OEM, you can be confident in the knowledge that capacity planning for delivering planned preventative maintenance, calibration and repair services is easier than you think.

Interested in learning more?

We’ve created a new datasheet that identifies three ways medical OEMs can drive customer satisfaction in after-sales support. You can download it here: