Does Your Dealership Have a Hardware Replacement Strategy in Place?
No business likes to experience downtime or disruptions because of the negative financial impacts that are involved. In the case of machinery and equipment dealerships, it can mean the difference between profit and loss for the operation.
It isn’t easy to visit a dealership, and the work is often overwhelming, but there are things that can be done with your technology to avoid downtime.
Let’s discuss some hardware replacement strategies that help stabilize your IT operations and limit emergencies and downtime.
Hardware Replacement Strategies
Here are some hardware replacement strategies you should be implementing for your machinery and equipment dealerships.
Proactive vs. Reactive
It is no secret that reactive decisions made in an emergency are often wrong or worse, expensive. In contrast, proactive planning can be far less expensive than reactive spending, especially when it comes to dealership technology.
rocketwise offers an Account Management solution for a proactive approach to dealership technology. Our clients receive an annual budget overview for the calendar year, and it includes quarterly detailed budgets, outlining which hardware will need to be replaced within its useful lifecycle.
This avoids reactive spending and puts power back into your hands with proactive planning, which results in less downtime and disruptions.
Useful Age Timeframe
So, how do you know the ideal hardware replacement timelines?
We have done the research and learned how long hardware is statistically reliable. Here are the recommended replacement timelines on the following:
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- Infrastructure (Servers, switches, firewalls, wireless access points, battery backups) – 60 months
- Workstations and Laptops – 36 months
- Mobile Devices (Smart Phones or Tablets) – 24 to 36 months
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This will give you a better idea of how often you need to implement hardware replacements, and you can plan accordingly.
Reliable Use and Affordable Planning
Technology hardware only has one value for your dealership – usage, which becomes evident when you try to resell tech hardware and it has little to no returns for your business. Our philosophy is to buy slightly above the exact specification of hardware that a dealership requires today.
Such purchases provide incredible long-term value because it future-proofs your hardware for longer.
For example, for physical servers, we make a list of the software that runs on the server and the size of data storage currently required. We then use the software system requirements and vendor feedback to specify server hardware that will handle the current workload and the projected workload at the end of the hardware’s life cycle.
Occasionally, we will need to do a hardware upgrade to accommodate a new business application but 99% of the time, the specified server works great for its expected life cycle and the client saves thousands of dollars.
Moreover, we have developed a standard hardware specification for workstations and laptops that we keep on the shelf, ready for deployment. This adds to business efficiency and the configuration works for all but the field service grade laptops that service technicians’ need.
By standardizing on a single platform, we can streamline the setup and configuration processes and keep costs low.
Takeaway
The fact is that when you proactively replace hardware based on industry-standard reliability periods like rocketwise, you can significantly reduce costs, downtimes, and disruptions. This, in turn, will improve productivity for your dealership and increase its revenue and growth.
Most of rocketwise’s revenue comes from flat-rate support contracts, and we do not lose sight of this by inflating the prices of replacement hardware.
We know that sticking to the recommended hardware replacement schedule, unplanned downtime, and outages almost disappear – a true win-win situation for everyone!
We want your dealership to have the stability and efficiency that it deserves–and nothing less. Our interests lie in keeping your hardware up-to-date and at peak performance, as it should, so your dealership runs at top shape.
If you want to learn more about hardware replacement strategy or get your hardware within useful lifecycles, contact us today.
