10x pacier Acer repairs

ApplianSys is pleased to announce that Acer has joined a growing number of consumer electronics vendors and retail companies that have turned to caching to streamline repair services.

Some repairs to faulty or damaged hardware can often be carried out in minutes. But any time a Windows^® or Chromebook operating system installation or update is required, hours are added to the job as these large files need to be downloaded from the internet. As a result, skilled technicians either remain idle or begin other repairs, introducing inefficiencies, increasing the risk of mistakes being made and, ultimately, risking customer satisfaction.

At one of Acer’s repair centres in the USA, up to 10 devices were downloading software files at the same time. As a result, the location’s 50Mbps internet link was heavily congested, making downloads even slower, preventing further repair work.

To increase productivity and protect customer satisfaction, Acer needed to remove the bottleneck created by slow downloads. But increasing bandwidth was expensive, and planned expansion at the centre would require a further costly upgrade in future. And even with more bandwidth a speed improvement wouldn’t be guaranteed – software updates are notoriously slow to download, regardless of capacity.

Acer chose instead to resolve the issue by deploying a CACHEBOX230 that, by storing a local copy of the files, can serve multiple requests at LAN speeds – all at the same time. “Within days, CACHEBOX was serving up to 99% of software update requests locally,” explains ApplianSys Senior Support Engineer, Steve Mason. “With CACHEBOX230’s SSD storage, the repair centre was quickly serving updates to 20 devices at once, dramatically reducing repair times.”

“This is great news for Acer and its customers,” explains Harminder Heer, ApplianSys Senior CACHEBOX Consultant. “For vendors like Acer and our other retail customers who repair devices in-store whilst customers wait, caching is now a fundamental component of any consumer electronics repair facility. Acer has been able to increase the completion rate of repairs tenfold, from 10 per hour to 100.”

About Acer

Acer is a Taiwanese global consumer electronics vendor – in 2015, the sixth-largest personal computer vendor in the world. The company’s products include desktop PCs, laptop PCs (including Chromebooks), tablets, servers, storage devices, Virtual Reality devices, displays, smartphones and peripherals.