REAV

Glossary

Triage

The intake decision that routes each incoming device toward repair, parts harvesting, direct resale or recycling.

Triage is the first decision point in a refurbishment flow and the one with the widest financial consequences. On the strength of a quick inspection and automated diagnostics, each device is sent down a path: straight to resale, into repair, into parts recovery, or to recycling.

The decision is economic, not only technical. A device is worth repairing when the expected recovered value exceeds the cost of the parts and the labour it will consume, at the probability it will actually be fixed. Get triage wrong in one direction and you spend technician hours on units that will never sell; wrong in the other and you scrap devices that were worth saving.

Because triage is fast and repetitive, it is also where inconsistency creeps in quickest. Written criteria and a recorded decision per serial number are what keep it from becoming an individual judgement call, and what make it possible to review, afterwards, whether the calls were right.

Related terms

  • Device grading The standardised assessment that assigns a used device a cosmetic and functional condition, driving its price and its route through the workshop.
  • Repair yield The share of devices entering a workshop that leave it working and saleable, instead of being scrapped or harvested for parts.
  • Parts harvesting Recovering working components from devices that cannot be economically repaired, to supply the repair of others.
  • SOP A written, versioned instruction that defines how one operation is performed, so any trained technician produces the same result.

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