Unilog.SC Releases Report on Right to Repair Challenges and Solutions

LYNBROOK, N.Y., Sept. 28, 2026 /CourierPR/ -- The report delves into the operational challenges and opportunities that the new right to repair rules in Europe and the U.S. present for service and supply chain teams.

The European Union's Directive on the repair of goods, which took effect on July 31, 2026, mandates that manufacturers provide repair information to third parties. Additionally, ecodesign rules for servers and data storage products require manufacturers to make this information available during registration. As a result, independent repairers, refurbishers, and customers now have access to service operations that were previously designed for internal use.

Eyal Yossef, VP of Supply Chain Solutions at Unilog.SC, emphasized that right to repair is not just a regulatory or documentation issue but an operational challenge.

The report highlights several key findings. Service documentation must be adapted to work for external technicians, as manuals written for in-house teams rely on internal part numbers, proprietary tools, and undocumented steps. Rewriting these manuals for third parties requires technical authoring skills that many service organizations have never needed. Spare parts catalogs are becoming public commitments, and companies must make deliberate decisions about what they supply, to whom, at what lead time, and for how long.

Repair capacity is also a physical infrastructure issue. Repair depends on benches, calibrated testers, and trained people. Losing the test rig for a discontinued platform can turn every failure on that installed base into a replacement. Refurbished parts need traceable history and consistent grading. Serial-level history must travel with every second-life part, and grading terms must mean the same thing in every depot and in customer contracts.

Unilog.SC has developed a practical repair readiness checklist centered on documentation, parts, process, and traceability. Among the recommended first steps are identifying and assigning ownership of repair-information request channels, testing service procedures with unfamiliar engineers, documenting the location and ownership of test equipment for discontinued platforms, and reconstructing the history of refurbished units in inventory.

The report also explores how logistics providers can expand repair capacity. Much of what gets booked as repair, including firmware updates, battery cycling, module swaps, kitting, hardware revision upgrades, and the recovery and testing of decommissioned assets, does not require specialist engineers. A skilled fourth-party logistics (4PL) provider can perform this work inside the warehouses where inventory already sits, avoiding a return trip to a central depot and reserving in-house expertise for the failures that need it.

Unilog.SC, recognized by Gartner® as one of the top 17 global service providers included in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Fourth-Party Logistics (4PL), provides real-time visibility, inventory and order management, reverse logistics, and a broad range of value-added and global trade services.