Blog: OEM vs. “Grey Market” ATM Parts: What’s the Difference?

High failure and call rates, long downtimes of devices, extensive lack of knowledge … these are the problems customers of the so-called “grey market” have to struggle with every day when they source replacement parts from aftermarket providers. Many people don’t know that grey-market providers neither use original replacement parts nor make an effort in reinstating them. Another big disadvantage is that they do not have access to technical background information such as actual firmware and mandatory revision levels, and they often don’t have the appropriate test equipment. As you can see, there are many reasons to stay away from the grey market.

At Diebold Nixdorf, we take a different path; our goal is to ensure the parts we provide are authentic, best-in-class and ready to drive high availability for your terminals. We are a trusted partner to our clients, and we uphold a promise in terms of reliability and endurance. Only Diebold Nixdorf is able to provide original parts which fulfill all technical specifications and firmware levels. To satisfy the Service-Level-Agreement (SLA) requirements of our end customers, we ensure a high availability of our parts at a very competitive cost base. Our standardized logistic processes are scalable, lean and deliver the best quality. It is our daily business to ensure that global field service organizations get spare parts on time, which typically means that the parts have to be with the engineers before a call comes in or within a few hours. We fulfill these standards through our global supply chain and the highly integrated, automated, end-to-end processes between our call management and field services, parts management team and service supply chain.

Sourcing Diebold Nixdorf OEM Parts

There are two ways for an engineer to get a needed spare part. Either they have the part already on hand in their car stock or they get the part via emergency delivery from one of our global Field Service Stocking locations. The replenishment of personal inventory is mainly organized via overnight delivery, either directly to a car or via a pick-up and drop-off point. For emergency deliveries, we use several different methods of deliveries, depending on the specific situation. This could mean field-engineer pick up, emergency courier via motorcycle or taxi, or even “next flight out” deliveries. Although we follow a standardized process blueprint, we also have locally optimized processes adapted to the specialties of each market, which enables us to ensure high quality with a competitive cost base.

Altogether, our parts replacement services include spare part planning, procurement of spare parts, logistic operations such as transportation and warehousing, returns management and the repair of defect spare parts. We repair down to chip-level, exchange preventive consumables, use only original spare parts and upgrade the newest revision levels by using original, authorized test equipment. We follow an approach of having internal as well as external repair centers. Currently, in addition to our internal repair centers (at locations including North Canton Ohio, U.S., Sao Paulo, Brazil and Bangkok, Thailand) we manage two main external repair partners with several repair locations around the globe, including Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and Teplice, Czech Republic.

When you’re faced with terminal disruption, it is tempting to source parts from the grey market. But remember that aftermarket parts providers have a different goal in mind, one that likely doesn’t prioritize long-term customer satisfaction.

Do you have questions about Diebold Nixdorf OEM parts, parts replacement, or aftermarket parts? We can answer them. Let’s start a conversation.