OREANDA-NEWS. MAYKOR, a leading Russian provider of IT and Business Process Outsourcing services, is expanding its collaboration with the Media Markt network by building on its current packaging equipment maintenance contract with an agreement to service the engineering infrastructure at 23 Russian supermarkets owned by the biggest electronics and household appliances chain in Europe.

Media Markt stores each use several hundred working demonstration models, from TVs to smartphones, something that is a major burden on electric mains and requires a specific temperature. Engineering systems must be completely reliable not only to protect and display the products for sale, but also to provide a comfortable atmosphere for customers that spend half an hour on average in Media Markt stores. To that end MAYKOR is offering technical support and repair for heating systems, ventilation, air conditioning, sewage, water supplies, and power supplies.

Media Markt already has a practice of collaboration with MAYKOR, the supplier has a contract in place since 2013 to service packing equipment. MAYKOR began maintaining the chain's engineering systems in 2014, beginning with a pilot project in several stores that lasted six months. In that time the outsourcer came through with flying colors, leading Media Markt to decide in favor of expanding and extending the partnership.

The project stretches across the biggest cities in the Central, Northwestern, Southern, and Siberian federal districts: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh, Bryansk, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, Orenburg, and Krasnoyarsk. Existing branches and resource bases in each of those cities enables MAYKOR to fulfill the contract in-house and offer a unified service level throughout each of the stores.

"Engineering systems are not readily apparent to customers, though they would easily notice outages that may occur in any of them. Working with MAYKOR allows us to meet a number of our maintenance objectives related to how our engineering infrastructure works, upholding high comfort standards in our stores," said Evgeny Pavlitsky, head of the maintenance department at Media-Markt-Saturn.

"The fact that our expertise encompasses the entire range of systems making up engineering infrastructure permits MAYKOR to fully take on the task of providing for day-to-day store function. For our part, we hope for a productive and mutually beneficial partnership with Media Markt in the future," noted Leonid Futlik, vice president of engineering systems development at MAYKOR.