Spare parts available for at least 5 years
“When you sell, you sell a machine and a service”. warns Michel Aurejac, employee of Swap Europe, in the preamble. This precision takes on its full meaning when you arrive at the Swap depot in Verdun sur Garonne and enter the warehouse. On all the racks, boxes of spare parts pile up, follow one another and rise in imposing brown columns. One of Swap’s main missions, if need be recalled, is to guarantee the availability of spare parts for at least 5 years, and therefore to guarantee the possibility of repairing its machine. This is also what makes it unique when the bulk of the competition today prefers to exchange or refund. The National Assembly voted in December 2019 in favor of the obligation, from 2021, of an index of repairability of electrical and electronic products, one can reasonably think that spare parts have a future ahead of them.
The deposit in a few words
The physical translation of this conservation of parts, the Verdun depot expresses it bluntly. The warehouse of course and its thousands of references, its pallets, shipped daily by Swap Europe employees. A break room. An open-space where the offices are installed which manage logistics, characterization of spare parts and answers to technical questions from our customers. It is also a recycling center whose foundations were laid in the fall of 2019 and which will rise from the ground this spring.
The rise of reconditioning
From 7,000 parts processed in 2018 in reworking across Europe, Swap Europe has grown to 105,000 modified products in 2019. Demanding work in rarely optimal conditions (emergency interventions most of the time in transit areas), Swap has nevertheless managed to make a reputation with distributors and manufacturers. “The reworking activity of Swap Europe consists of reworking a whole defective series of machines already produced, to bring them back into conformity.
“In order,” lists the site manager, “we treated 7,000 Screwdrivers / Jigsaws, 40,000 barbecues, 21,000 brush cutters, then 22,000 mosquito lamps, followed by 800 sanders, 1,600 mulchers, to end up with 12,000 generators. took really well this year! “.
The challenges to be met
Waste, pollution, obsolescence, what if reconditioning becomes our priority? While the logistics specific to the flow of spare parts represent an important part of the Verdun depot’s activities, other challenges must be met. The recycling center. “Recycling would allow us to process plastics” specifies Styve Clavière, head of the reconditioning center. “The opportunity to reduce waste while giving a second life to our reworked products or parts. Recovering healthy parts from non-repairable machines, to reuse them, assemble them and make them a functional machine, that’s our goal. . “
