How much are you spending on asset management?

Posted by Learning2Reed@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 11 comments

I’m not doing something right here.

I’m buying boxes, printing labels, paying for shipping, and paying for tracking. Which is fine on a small scale. The problem is, our company is not the same tiny one I started at 10 years ago. This has become entirely too expensive and takes way too much of my time at scale.

So I guess to help put this into full perspective for me, how much are you spending on remote employee asset management as a whole and is there a better way?

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UsefulRub5703@reddit

We ran into something similar while trying to manage assets at scale — the cost and time overhead adds up really quickly.

One thing that helped was moving away from manual tracking and using a simple system to track assets digitally (QR-based in our case). It reduced the need for constant labeling, tracking, and back-and-forth.

Still depends on the size of the team, but once things scale, the time cost becomes bigger than the actual shipping cost.

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OneSeaworthiness7768@reddit

I’m buying boxes, printing labels, paying for shipping, and paying for tracking. Which is fine on a small scale. The problem is, our company is not the same tiny one I started at 10 years ago. This has become entirely too expensive and takes way too much of my time at scale.

I refuse to believe people are struggling this much with shipping computers such that it warrants what seems like a now daily post about it. This is market research.

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JLee50@reddit

It’s just missing the standard “I’m curious how others are handling this?” at the end, lol

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SoapBoxGradeA@reddit

There’s no reason you need to be doing everything yourself lol. Check out what allwhere is doing. We use them and they are fantastic. I check in for a few minutes for any procurement and retrieval requests and they manage the rest for us. Literally everything you mentioned that you’re doing step by step in house can be swapped out with a faster and reliable process with a third party asset management company.

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trebuchetdoomsday@reddit

$10 on lenovo add hash to intune, ship directly to end user, and it’s not my job to ensure devices are returned (offboarded, sure).

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TuxAndrew@reddit

Yup, the burden of the cost falls in the department not collecting equipment from their end users.

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matiascoca@reddit

The shape of this problem changes pretty dramatically once you cross the threshold of a few hundred remote employees, and the usual answer is to stop owning the logistics layer entirely. Three approaches that the teams I've talked to in this exact spot have used.

First, device-as-a-service through one of the big resellers (CDW, Insight, SHI) or a dedicated provider like Hofy, Firstbase, or Workwize. They handle procurement, imaging, shipping, return logistics, and end-of-life. You pay a monthly per-seat rate that's higher than buying outright but lower than the fully loaded cost of you doing it yourself once you count your time, the warehouse space, the broken stuff, and the missed deadlines. The break-even is usually around 50 to 100 active devices being shipped per quarter.

Second, drop ship from the OEM directly to the employee. Dell, Lenovo, Apple Business all support this and most people don't realize it. You can have a laptop image preloaded by the OEM (custom image services) and shipped straight to a new hire's home with autopilot or DEP enrollment kicking in on first boot. Removes the receiving, imaging, and re-shipping steps entirely. This works really well if you have enough volume to justify a relationship with an account rep.

Third, for the return side specifically, services like ReturnMates, GoBolt, or even just providing a prepaid return label with a regional carrier consolidation point cuts the per-device return cost in half versus individual courier pickups.

The thing that almost always tips the spreadsheet toward outsourcing is not the per-device cost, it's the time the IT person (you) spends on logistics versus actual sysadmin work. If you're hitting the size where this is your full-time job two days a week, you've already lost more in salary than the outsourced premium would cost.

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