The Differences Between ITAD and Depot Services

Do you want to improve the longevity of your IT assets? Perhaps you have a large employee base that’s using an ever-growing inventory of tech, spurred by the mindset shift towards remote and hybrid working. These new approaches need an agile support system to ensure seamless experiences.

For over 30 years, Ingram Micro Lifecycle has supported businesses worldwide with their technology requirements. We’ve managed fleets of IT assets for businesses of all sizes and across a variety of industries.

In this piece, we’ll explain the differences between depot services and ITAD (IT Asset Disposition) to help you understand the value of each for your company, making you more sustainable and efficient.

What are Depot Services?

Depot Services are a range of third-party solutions that provide end-to-end lifecycle support for corporate technology. The breadth of these services covers products from PCs to laptops, smartphones to tablets. It includes the following:

Configuration and fulfillment: technology can be modified to suit your needs between uses. For example, loading specific software or kitting the product with certain peripheral equipment, ready to be dispatched directly to the intended user.
Inventory management: available assets are recorded with visibility of factors such as age and condition status. Storage space is required for the assets with suitable security considerations. Typically you’ll have live access to call off and request specific assets as and when needed.
New user onboarding and departing user collection: the management of assets ensures new users requiring tech receive the correct and appropriate equipment, and assets are retrieved from leavers of the program promptly. For example, employees leave a company and must return laptops and smartphones.
Repair and refurbishment: the recovery of used technology involves condition assessment to determine necessary repairs and refurbishment that extend the useful lifecycle.

ITAD falls under Depot Services as one of the wider offerings. While it’s a service that can be offered standalone, it can also be part of a package of additional Depot Services solutions.

The benefits of Depot Services

There are many financial and sustainability benefits to investing in depot services for your corporate IT equipment.

In life

Putting a regular cadence in place for the routine check-up of equipment ensures alignment with the latest security and software updates, keeping your data protection at the top of its game. This also keeps equipment running smoothly and optimized, minimizing the downtime associated with any issues like crashing, so users have a more seamless experience.

Being more aware of the condition of your assets leads to more preventative rather than reactive fixes for issues associated with the age of tech, for example. This decreases the risks of downtime but also improves the response time when problems occur. Maintaining a solid inventory of assets enables stock to be swapped so users aren’t without tech for the whole duration of the repair time. This reduces the overall negative impacts on your business performance.

Maintaining an inventory of IT assets can take up a lot of physical space, depending on the volume and type of product being stored. Using a third-party partner alleviates the necessity of optimizing your space to allow for this storage. They would also be responsible for any logistics associated with getting your products to users, which can be more cumbersome if supporting remote/hybrid workers as opposed to single central offices. Outsourcing reduces the responsibility on your employees and allows them to focus on strategic core business functions.

Saving time is another great benefit when IT equipment is issued to new starters preconfigured and ready to go straight from the box. This gets new employees or joiners to your program out of the starting blocks with minimal delays. They won’t have to worry about finding earphones for their laptop or locating a case for their smartphone if everything is ready and handed to them on day one. Preconfigurations can include not only practical peripherals that will enable maximized use of the tech but also security enhancements like pre-installing software or blocking any sites that your company policy doesn’t permit use of.

Then when users leave your program, for example, if they’re employees leaving your business, the depot services partner will retrieve all assets on time. Asset management will show the specific IT assets belonging to your company that each user has to ensure accurate repossession. After the devices are physically collected, these are assessed to determine suitability for reuse, recommerce, or recycling. In the majority of cases, tech will be cleaned (of data and hygienically) before adding back into inventory for re-use.

Keeping your assets in the best condition is an option that can make strategic sense to outsource via depot services. This route can free up your internal IT resources for more forward-thinking planning and innovation, keeping your business competitive. Internal IT teams can often spend more time fire-fighting issues, restraining their time so they can't think ahead instead of continually dealing with day-to-day problems.

End of life

Where equipment isn’t suitable for re-use, perhaps because it is beyond economical repair or simply too old, components can be carefully taken apart to be reused in extending the lifecycle of other equipment. For example, a plastic outer casing (if in like-new condition) can be saved if the internal parts are no longer usable. This plastic casing can be used as a replacement for a similar product if the original is damaged beyond repair. Harvesting donor parts produces an inventory of components to lower the cost of future repairs.

Parts or units that can’t be salvaged are responsibly recycled to lower the negative environmental impacts and ensure that your assets don’t become e-waste. The Global E-waste Monitor has revealed that e-waste generation is growing 5 times faster than documented e-waste recycling so more efforts must be made to decrease this burden on the environment.

If assets are usable, there’s the opportunity for value recovery. This amount, once obtained through recommerce channels, can be funneled back into the business. For example, these funds can be used towards the purchase of new equipment, lowering the acquisition cost. Alternatively, you can donate unwanted equipment or the money acquired through resale to charitable organizations, boosting philanthropy.

This activity, enabling equipment a new lease of life elsewhere, or even within your company after redeployment, is more sustainable than the purchase of new tech. By using assets for as long as possible, the refresh point is postponed, and the acquisition of newer models is delayed. This alleviates the pressure on manufacturing for new goods, which has a knock-on effect for reducing mining and consumption of raw naturally-produced, and perhaps finite materials. Ultimately it also reduces the carbon footprint associated with using technology as you’re not constantly using materials. It's estimated that e-waste contains $91 billion worth of metal.

What is ITAD?

ITAD, or IT Asset Disposition, is part of the depot services suite of solutions. ITAD focuses on the end-of-life disposition or fleet refresh of IT assets in particular, rather than on the lifecycle extension of the product. Technology is either refurbished and reused, compliantly disposed of, broken down for parts harvesting, or recycled, having no use as a whole unit.

Shredding is also applied where data-bearing devices are of a highly sensitive nature, containing personal or business information that poses a high risk if recovered.

ITAD solutions provide detailed reporting and certifications for audit trails and are deployed for assets where reuse isn’t viable for the business.

In some cases, there are overlaps with the benefits of depot services as a whole, but as ITAD specifically deals with assets at the end of their current useful life, we highlight here those most pertinent for security and compliance.

The benefits of ITAD

An ITAD program ensures compliance with both environmental and legislative requirements, keeping your data protected from security risks and breaches. The complete visibility and tracking of assets is supported by certifications and reports, providing robust audit trails for compliance.

The e-waste your business generates is minimized via appropriate recycling and reuse of components. Where suitable, parts will be harvested for extending the lifecycle of other similar products. There are additional environmental benefits here, as mentioned above for depot services. The repair and refurbishment of assets using donor parts instead of new parts consumes less raw materials and alleviates the requirements of manufacturing.

Except in cases where highly sensitive data is present, there is the option to recover value on assets that can be redeployed and sold through recommerce channels. These assets can be repaired and refurbished to lift the condition grade, obtaining a higher value on the secondary market. The owner of this equipment will, in most cases, get a monetary value back as part of the value recovery and this can subsidize the investment in new equipment acquisition.

Get support for your business technology

ITAD is one service within the wider depot services offering, so you may have noticed that some of the benefits overlap. Most importantly, both keep your data protection and security on track with auditable paperwork trails.

Ingram Micro Lifecycle works with businesses around the globe, providing depot services. These include pallet and box collections, agile to collect small and large volumes of assets. Our global footprint supports national and international organizations, ensuring one strong, single provision. Our end-to-end lifecycle management services are underpinned by our proprietary program, BlueIQ, which enables complete transparency for our customers of stock, reporting, and service requests. Our forward-thinking, innovative approaches ensure cost-effective and sustainable solutions.

Get in touch with our team today if you’d like to discuss our depot services in more detail.