If you’re maintaining a few hundred APX two-way radios, or thousands, 
keeping all of them working properly is not an easy task. It takes special coordination, time and expertise.
To help us better understand customer radio management decision-making, we surveyed our Motorola APX two-way radio users across the U.S. and highlighted the findings in the 2017 Motorola Solutions APX Two-Way Radio Management Survey.
What did we find? Radio managers of both small and large fleets face similar challenges. Budgets constraints, lack of technical resources and programming complexities are challenges for both in-house and third-party radio management. However, forward-looking agencies of all sizes are realizing the benefits of leveraging services to assist their in-house technical staff or to provide expert resources to manage their radio fleets.
Top 3 Benefits of Using Radio Services:
1. Services Provide Technical Expertise for In-house Personnel
Survey respondents indicated 73% manage radios with in-house personnel. However, radio managers are challenged with having to juggle all the duties—and additional responsibilities—that come with the job. Typically, the technical staff tasked with the job is a small team relative to the amount of work. They must keep up with needed technical skills, understand how to optimize the latest radio features, and keep track of constant talk group changes as employees and even their own team members come and go.
Services provide expert help to support your in-house technical staff. You can get access to technical experts who are using state-of-the-art diagnostics equipment and repair tools to troubleshoot problems and properly restore your two-way radios. Our experts function as an extension of your in-house technical team, or as a source for all technical support. Flexible service options are designed to support your needs and budget requirements.
2. Services Reduce Programming Time and Accelerate Deployment
Radio managers are constantly faced with increasing programming demands that involve physically touching each radio to complete updates. With hundreds or thousands of radios, programming can take weeks or even months to update—and may be outdated by the time all changes are made. This is a time consuming, costly and inefficient use of resources for the 58% of survey respondents that reprogram their radio fleet once or more every year.
Services can support your existing radio management staff. This includes a dynamically different way to speed up radio programming by as much as 90%. Imagine…making template changes that are done all at once, eliminating the need to handle each radio one-at-a-time. And, storing radio changes online to ensure your data is backed up. You no longer need multiple spreadsheets to keep track of changes. No more worries about lost data.
Your radio management team will be thoroughly trained to become expert radio programmers that spend only 10% of the time they formally spent on reprogramming.
3. Services Prevent Radio Downtime
To prevent downtime and ensure small issues don’t grow into larger problems, you should have a proactive maintenance schedule for your radio fleet. We were surprised to discover over 70% of survey respondents only perform radio hardware maintenance on an as-needed basis. This may mean something breaks, and then they fix it.
Preventive maintenance ensures your radios are functioning properly. If you don’t have the proper radio staff or tools, you can have expert professionals manage your the entire radio fleet to transfer responsibility and risk. Managed services professionals provide radio maintenance, repair, programming, technical support and more—so you can rest assured your radios are available at all times.
Services Increase Performance, Lower Risk and Achieve Better Outcomes
2017 Motorola Solutions APX Two-Way Radio Management Survey found clear interest in using services to successfully manage two-way radios. And for good reason. Services improve radio reliability while reducing the cost and time of managing radios.
Want to learn more about the benefits of two-way radio services?
Look: View this video to see how expert services help increase radio performance.
Listen: Prerecorded webinar provides a transformational case study on how to reduce programming time and accelerate deployment of your radios.
Learn: Read this paper to learn how you can implement a two-way radio plan to increase uptime, and control costs.
