June 12, 2018
Economy of scale meets secure chain-of-custody
In an ideal world, every business resource would be located at point of need. Yet for many businesses – particularly ones that require secure services or rely on specialized equipment and personnel – it’s necessary to balance proximity with economies of scale: while distributed processing is convenient it can be prohibitively expensive in practice, particularly at lower volumes.
This is especially true of IT Asset Disposition. Whether you choose to have your ITAD partner sanitize or shred hard drives at your location and then transport them for further processing – or have your assets transported to the nearest ITAD facility for all processing – the activities around refurbishing for reuse or demanufacturing and recycling are most cost-effective when centralized.
Since the location of processing centers is based on the volume of assets in a particular geographical area, this shifts the focus on cost savings ships to logistics: what can the ITAD provider do to minimize costs while maintaining control and security?
Chain-of-custody is enhanced when an ITAD provider uses its own trucks rather than outsourcing transportation. This is because fewer people and organizations handle any given shipment which in turn means the ITAD provider has greater control. While this goal is still a volume-based proposition and is therefore not possible for all locations, owned trucks remain the preferable solution when possible.
This is where logistics hubs come into play. By using a hub and spoke transportation arrangement to support regions at a greater distance, an ITAD provider can extend the service area each processing center covers to cost-effectively provide direct services to more client locations.
This is particularly true if a company implements “active” logistics hubs rather than ones that are only freight forwarding points.
Active logistics hubs serve as home bases for trucks and drivers and offers point-of-need onsite services like hard drive erasure or shredding in addition to collection. Housed in secure facilities that usually host non-ITAD company operations – e.g., Ingram Micro distribution centers – active hubs support asset collection with transport aggregation to lower per-unit transportation costs.
Ingram Micro ITAD has embraced this efficient approach to customer service and transportation cost reduction with nine new logistics hubs scheduled to open in 2018, bringing our total North American facility count to twenty. The first three – Orlando, FL; Hebron, KY; and Las Vegas, NV – are already in service with additional locations opening over the coming months to better serve our clients.
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