After taking a hit this year, global IT spending may rise but US spending will face another uphill climb in 2021. Gartner is predicting a 4% global increase to $3.8 trillion, compared to a drop of 5.4% in 2020. Forrester is expecting U.S. tech investment to fall 1.5% in 2021.
One prediction we can all agree on: IT budgets everywhere are going to remain under pressure. Delivering hardware asset management (HAM) cost savings, coupled with improved effectiveness, is guaranteed to get noticed by executive management. We’ve developed some great new calculators to help find those attention-getting ROI’s:
- Eliminate ghost assets. The average hardware budget wastes 3-5% on assets you no longer have or you never received. That means you could be paying a boatload in unnecessary maintenance and license fees, insurance and taxes. One company discovered asset maintenance and support contracts for ghost equipment totaling $2 million per quarter. Hardware asset management can achieve huge ROI by eliminating ghost assets. Use our Ghost Asset ROI Calculator to determine your current and future exposure.
- Increase utilization. Our Asset Utilization Calculator lets you plug in the number of your assets, plus average hardware, software and maintenance costs, and calculate how much you can save by increasing utilization. No matter where you start, we have found that companies can easily achieve and maintain 95% utilization with complete and current hardware tracking. Take a global shipping giant with 18% of nearly 300,000 hardware assets sitting on shelves. At $500 per asset, that’s $27 million tied up in unused stock. Decreasing it to 5% would save $19.5 million.
- Enhance efficiency. Check out our calculator for Labor Savings and Productivity. You can review your financials for moving from manual to more automated receiving, IMAC, physical audits and disposal. Relying on spreadsheets to track hardware compromises data accuracy, and therefore, compliance and security. A whopping 88% of all spreadsheets contain errors, and almost 1 in 5 large businesses have suffered financial losses due to spreadsheet mistakes. A leading U.S. healthcare organization saved $5 million in soft costs over five years after moving from spreadsheets to IT tracking and control system software.
- Expedite receiving and deploying. The faster purchased equipment gets to end users, the better. You can baseline your current costs and productivity for these activities using this calculator. Then identify ways to streamline operations and drive down costs, such as automating uploading hardware data into your CMDB with asset tracking software.
- Improve P.O. reconciliation. There are discrepancies of 3% to 5% per hardware order, according to AssetTrack Pro managed services provider Re-Source Partners. Consolidating hardware requests, purchases, receiving and reconciliation on a single system gives you dashboard tracking throughout the process to ensure you get what you bought.
- Hardware asset management depot services. Managing hardware logistics internally means sinking a lot of capital into warehouses, plus requiring service techs to handle tasks, such as unpacking boxes and installing tracking tags. That work is below their pay grade. Plus, remote workers are adding new layers of complexity to hardware logistics, including handling repairs, refreshes and disposal. Our calculator lets you plug in key cost variables for managing a depot. Then compare these costs to the hardware asset management ROI when outsourcing depot services using AssetTrack Pro®.
Budgets are tight, but companies want and need to move forward with priority projects. Hardware asset management is the rare investment that can deliver a fast and significant ROI. Please contact me at [email protected] if you’d like to learn more.
