Conquer Inefficient and Costly Hardware Management

Companies today face numerous challenges when it comes to managing their hardware and IT assets. Lack of visibility and tracking and cumbersome manual processes are all problems that most businesses continue to grapple with. Inefficient equipment deployment, servicing, and retrieval processes also lead to a poor employee experience.

As a result, the hardware asset management market is becoming increasingly vital as organizations strive to optimize their IT infrastructure and reduce costs.

In this blog we look at hardware and logistics market trends and spell out the opportunity for advisors and their customers. We detail solutions advisors can integrate into their portfolio right now to drive new revenues and increase their share of wallet.

We’ll also draw on Chris Herd’s in-depth presentation to advisors at the AppDirect January State of the Union webinar. As Firstbase’s General Manager, Chris challenged advisors to reflect on the ways they can help their customers conquer their hardware challenges: “The question a lot of people should be asking is, how many CIOs inside the companies that you work with would benefit from an extra two or three pairs of hands on a day-to-day basis?”

The growing importance of hardware and logistics lifecycle management

According to Gartner, 30% of hardware assets are lost, missing, or unaccounted for, leading to significant financial losses and security risks. With 62% of employees working remotely nowadays and over 1.7 billion devices deployed worldwide, the need for efficient hardware and logistics lifecycle management has never been greater.

For IT leaders, managing the lifecycle of hardware through this transition to dispersed, hybrid work teams has evolved from the simple task of deploying and handing out laptops, to a complex workflow that involves logistics and asset management at every stage.

Hardware headaches—Manual processes, poor visibility and tracking, and security risks

Currently, much of the management for hardware and logistics is handled manually without effective tracking, leading to massive costs and waste—not to mention potential security, compliance, and other concerns.

“Almost every company operates in either a remote or hybrid mode in one way or another, meaning they have a lot of mobile devices, whether that's iPads or phones or laptops,” said Firstbase General Manager Chris Herd, speaking to advisors at AppDirect’s January 2025 State of the Union webinar. “A massive issue businesses run into is that many of these devices get lost or stolen and there can be a really big impact when you get this wrong. A good example was a global bank that was recently fined twenty million dollars because of misplaced hard drives that had important financial information on them.“

“A massive issue businesses run into is that many of these devices get lost or stolen and there can be a really big impact when you get this wrong.

—Chris Herd, General Manager, Firstbase

Summing up the major challenges customers face, Chris pointed to four key areas:

1. High touch and manual processes—Processes for managing employee equipment consume entire days of IT staff time.

2. IT staffing and budget constraints—IT teams are overwhelmed trying to manually support growing employee populations, leading to delays and a poor employee experience

3. Security and asset recovery—Poor equipment retrieval processes expose companies to significant financial losses and security risks

4. Providing local services—Distributed companies struggle without an IT local presence, making expansion challenging. As organizations expand globally, coordinating multiple third-party providers, and ensuring consistent inventory management across regions can cause major headaches and inefficiencies.

Businesses face challenges in other areas, too:

Headcount and workforce changes—Many businesses struggle with onboarding new employees, managing devices from departing staff, handling outstanding devices effectively, and inventory management, leading to delays and inefficiencies.

Mergers and acquisitions—Integrating newly acquired people and assets, managing increased IT workloads, and harmonizing onboarding and off-boarding procedures, present their own complex challenges.

Efficient scaling—Supporting an organization’s growth requires optimizing IT support-to-employee ratios and managing costs while ensuring a positive employee experience.

Impacts on the employee experience affect the bottom line

Not surprisingly, the way businesses handle hardware and logistics has a direct impact on their employees’ experience.

“Beyond issues with lost and misplaced equipment, this clearly incurs massive issues inside companies, with a lot of wasted time inside IT teams, the impact and experience for the end-user employee, which is often pretty terrible, and a lot of money wasted as a consequence of that,” affirmed Chris.

From procurement through to servicing, retrieval and disposal, having the right device lifecycle management strategy in place not only results in large cost reductions, it can also make or break employee productivity and morale.

• Fixing IT issues results in an average $3,165 of wasted productivity per employee per year

• One study found that three in ten employees are likely to look for a new job if they’re forced to use outdated technology in their workplace, and 80 percent of new hires who receive poor onboarding plan to quit.

Considering the time and costs involved in recruiting and onboarding new employees, this is a significant problem, making hardware and logistics a vital issue for business success—with impacts going straight to the bottom line.

The opportunity for advisors

The market opportunity is expanding by leaps and bounds. By 2028, 70% of organizations will adopt a managed device lifecycle service offering—up from 20% in 2024—highlighting the growing importance of effective hardware management. A Future Market Insights report projects the global hardware and asset management market to reach USD 98,076 million by 2024, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.9%.

For IT advisors, the complexities and challenges associated with hardware management present a unique and lucrative opportunity. As companies increasingly struggle to manage their IT assets effectively, advisors can step in to offer valuable solutions that not only solve these issues but also drive significant revenue.

"Firstbase allows you to deeply embed yourself as a trusted advisor to the CIO."

—Chris Herd

Four reasons to enter the hardware business 

1. Start selling hardware and lifecycle management—Firstbase is an opportunity for every advisor to begin playing in the hardware space, with software that lets advisors capture more share of wallet for the entirety of every device life cycle

2. Close more, bigger deals—Advisors can expect to close large deals, on which they’ll earn commissions.

3. Get in deeper with the CIO—It enables advisors to become more deeply embedded as a trusted advisor to the CIO.

4. Differentiate yourself—Advisors who can offer specialized hardware management solutions will stand out in the market. As more companies seek to address their hardware management challenges, advisors with the right expertise will be in high demand.

To dig deeper, you can explore training and resources for advisors about selling hardware and logistics. 

• Enroll in our Hardware & Logistics 101 course
• Access selling tools and resources on our Hardware and Logistics page

Firstbase: A single platform for hardware and logistics lifecycle management

Firstbase, recently acquired by AppDirect, helps IT teams solve all their hardware problems in a single platform that automates the entire lifecycle of hardware assets. From procurement and deployment to maintenance, retrieval, and disposal, it frees IT teams from time-consuming manual asset management and eliminates the need to procure hardware through multiple vendors, and centralizes IT spending.

“What that means,” said Chris, “is that we give any company the opportunity to automate their entire asset lifecycle—from getting new equipment to new employees, fixing things when they break, collecting things when workers leave, and storing it in our warehouses, through to the recycling at the end of a piece of equipment's life cycle. And we handle all of those things for any company while plugging into their existing business systems.”

"Right now, we work with everyone from SMBs to some of the world's fastest-growing tech companies and established enterprises. What we find is that every company faces these issues with asset management, and they're usually managing it manually, internally—either with many IT folks working on it, or by juggling it all in spreadsheets," Chris added.

Firstbase benefits at a glance

• Complete visibility and control over your IT assets’ lifecycle—Firstbase is a single platform to equip teams and manage assets. It handles global shipping, customs, and real-time tracking, ensuring equipment delivery and retrieval anywhere in the world.

• High retrieval rate and cost savings—For onboarding or offboarding, Firstbase manages device refreshes and retrievals, leading to a 97% retrieval rate and major cost savings.

• Improved data security and compliance—The platform maintains an auditable history of all devices, improving security and ensuring compliance with IT audits.

• Seamless hardware procurement and management—Firstbase provides options to buy, lease, or manage existing equipment, offering flexibility and further cost savings.

• Self-serve employee experience—The self-service portal allows employees to order equipment, ensuring they have the right tools from day one.

• Sustainability—Firstbase's sustainable practices, including device redeployment and recycling, extend the lifecycle of devices and reduce your customers' carbon footprint.

"Every company faces these issues with asset management, and they're usually managing it manually, internally—either with many IT folks working on it, or by juggling it all in spreadsheets."

—Chris Herd

If you’re a technology advisor, you can book a strategy session with our experts for a demo and a deeper dive into the Firstbase platform.

Key Firstbase features and capabilities

Zero-touch end-to-end provisioning

Firstbase offers zero-touch set-ups, handling orders and delivering pre-configured laptops and other devices directly to employees. All an employee has to do is open their device and log in. Offboarding and equipment retrievals are equally easy with automated processes and guidance from Firstbase.

Every step involves fully encrypted setups and verified logins, with data handling during retrievals and certificates of destruction for peace of mind.

“What we do is we let companies automate these entire flows end to end, meaning companies no longer have to ship things. They no longer have to image devices, and they no longer have to update spreadsheets with who has what. Firstbase handles all of those things automatically for the end user.”

Optimal workflow management, from onboarding to offboarding

The challenges Firstbase solves for companies are in the day-to-day workflows that IT teams face. “An example of this is the super manual onboarding processes for getting equipment to workers,” noted Chris. “People are shipping out boxes with equipment to workers or they're shipping out empty boxes to collect the equipment on the way back. But most organizations just don't have enough people to do this. And the people they do have are wasting a significant amount of time on these activities at the expense of working on the strategic things their companies need.”

For companies, it’s about the benefit of integration, Chris explained in a recent interview in CIO Influence. "They plug us into their HR platform or ITSM, and instead of tickets going to company IT or HR staff to take action, they come to Firstbase. This gives companies massive efficiency gains, allowing them to operate at a 1:1000s ratio of IT workers to employees, instead of the historical ratio of about 1:100. Firstbase then tracks who has it, where each product has been, when it needs to be upgraded, and automates everything that needs to happen related to those things inside the company."

One Firstbase customer, New Relic, is a prime example of this. Since moving its hardware management to Firstbase, it can now operate with one IT employee supporting approximately 1,250 employees, a 10X efficiency gain over the industry average.

“The question a lot of people should be asking is, how many CIOs inside the companies that you work with would benefit from an extra two or three pairs of hands on a day-to-day basis?”
—Chris Herd

Firstbase seamlessly handles all stages of the hardware lifecycle management across two main functions—onboarding and offboarding of employees

Onboarding

• Manage requests—Define hardware needs based on priorities, data, incidents, compliance, and budget

• Procure and fulfill—Select and purchase hardware within the allocated budget, considering vendor options, support levels, and compatibility with existing IT assets

• Set up and deploy—Tag, configure, and deploy the hardware, ensuring integration with other technologies and delivering it to the designated work area, including remote environments

• Track—Continuously track hardware performance and risks, focusing on aging resources, network placement, and outdated software

• Service—Perform regular maintenance, updates, and repairs. Decide if assets should be recycled, reassigned, or retired

Offboarding

• Retire—Decommission hardware at the end of its life, wiping corporate data, and either return, sell, donate, recycle, or dispose of the device properly

Full integration with business systems and processes

Firstbase plugs into all existing business systems. “So if a customer has an HCM platform like Workday, we can provision users and automatically onboard from there. The IT team and HR team don't have to do anything. IT leaders no longer have to click into multiple systems to figure out who's joining, who's leaving. They're no longer dealing with tickets, telling them who needs to get what equipment. This is all automated in the back end. Firstbase handles it all,” said Chris

Tracking and visibility into each asset’s entire lifecycle history

The Firstbase platform provides a full life cycle history of everything that's ever happened to any device. “We ensure the right person has the right equipment at the right time, wherever in the world they happen to be,” emphasized Chris.

Consolidated spend management and lower IT costs

Firstbase and AppDirect form a powerful duo, helping businesses streamline all their technology procurement activities. The Firstbase's hardware and logistics solutions, combined with AppDirect's world-leading catalog of services, provides a comprehensive approach to solving IT challenges. This ensures that employees always have the right tools and equipment to stay productive.

Cost savings are an integral part of Firstbase, with:

• Reduced maintenance costs

• More accurate, predictable hardware budgets

• More retrieved assets leading to lower hardware expenditures

• More efficient disposal processes

• Minimal manual work

“We help companies buy less stuff,” said Chris. “We let them maximize the lifecycle of every piece of equipment. And when it reaches its end of life, we handle the disposal and recycling of that as well. And not only that, we do that in a hundred and fifty countries globally. That means the end user has a single vendor to handle all of these things on their behalf.

Improved security and asset retrieval

Asset retrieval and security go hand in hand as major concerns for organizations. Firstbase solves both these issues effectively with a 97% retrieval rate that far exceeds the industry average of 30-50%.

AppDirect and Firstbase—A total solution

If you’re a technology advisor, offering hardware and logistics from Firstbase on top of the solutions you already sell from the AppDirect catalog differentiates you as a total solution provider with the ability to offer the full spectrum of solutions and support to your customers.

Unified lifecycle management

AppDirect helps companies streamline their procurement activities for all of their technology services portfolio across network and mobility, customer experience, software, infrastructure, security, managed services, and energy solutions.

Single master service agreement (MSA) 

Companies can consolidate their procurement processes by centralizing their IT spending through a single MSA and a single advisor, and leverage digital tools to manage expenditures across multiple categories. This offers streamlined management and reduced administrative overheads for CIOs and procurement teams.

Industry expertise

AppDirect provides expert guidance and professional services to help businesses evaluate, implement, and manage IT solutions tailored to their specific business needs.

For a detailed look at powerful strategies for selling Firstbase to your customers, register for our April 17, 2025 Hardware & Logistics webinar, with expert Jon Ross.

Get started selling Firstbase—Book a demo and strategy call

Firstbase Hardware and Logistics is ideal for any organization with 25 or more employees. Whether your customers need to save time, cut costs, or enhance their employee experience, partnering with AppDirect and Firstbase gives you a powerful strategic advantage in supporting your customers’ goals.

Book a strategy session with our experts for a demo and a deeper dive into the benefits of selling Firstbase.