Surveyors get service centre in Accra

PDSA Company Limited, authorised service partner for Leica Geosystems, has opened a service centre in Accra.

The centre, which is the second in the West African sub-region, with the other located in Senegal, is expected to reduce the downtime involved in shipping out surveying equipment for servicing and repairs.

The Managing Director of PDSA, Mr Maxwell Ansah, said for many years now, surveyors had laboured to acquire the best of surveying, monitoring and geological equipment and to repair faulty ones in the sub-region.

“PDSA is set up to represent Leica Geosystems AG here in Ghana. Leica is the leading surveying equipment manufacturer and they offer Total Stations, GPS/GNSS, mining, monitoring solutions and a whole range of services. These are basically some of the engineering solutions we provide.”

“After-sales service has been a major problem for customers here in Ghana for years. The closest Leica service centre in the sub-region is located in Senegal. Therefore, users of Leica products had to resort to either shipping their equipment to Senegal or Europe for repairs. Given the down time involved in shipping their equipment, surveyors and geologists have been anticipating for a service centre here in Anglophone West Africa,” he explained.

PDSA after a series of ‘Service Audits and support from Leica has opened an ultra-modern service centre located on the G2 Laboratory Building on the 37 Liberation Road in Accra.

The centre is well equipped to perform checks and adjust, standard maintenance, extended maintenance, repair services, and also offer training and consultancy.

PDSA has the needed technical competence to deal with any Leica equipment. The company has a technician for the service centre trained in the repair of Lieca machines in Switzerland.

“Every year the resident engineer had to go to Switzerland for training as part of the requirements for the setting up of the service centre. Experts from Leica were also sent down to Accra to check the systems installed before given the final approval for the centre. We assure the public that we have the best expertise in-house for all Leica-related issues.”

The Lieca Technical Support Engineer for North, Western and Central Africa, Mr Frank Reffreger, added that: “PDSA has been our distributor since 2011, so it’s been four years since they tried to put in further steps to increase the kind of services they provide to their customers.

With this centre, the customer does not need to send their equipment overseas to get them serviced because it takes a long time for the equipment to come back.

“I am happy firstly for the Lieca customers as they do not have to go through a lot of stress to have their instruments serviced. I am also happy for PDSA for opening this centre.

“I think that the market for Leica products is growing in some parts of West Africa and Ghana is one of such countries,” he said. The engineer said PDSA was now active in the country and other countries could service their equipment here in Accra as the company did not have such service centres in each country in West Africa

“I guess people would ship their equipment to Ghana for servicing as it is faster for them,” Mr Reffreger said.