Your company’s retired IT assets might still have some remaining life and value on the resale market. Remarketing them is a great way for your company to recover some of its IT investment. If you’re concerned about the cost of IT asset disposition, remarketing might cover some or all of your disposition costs. But if assets are damaged during storage and shipping, their resale value will be significantly reduced. Proper packing practices will protect your IT investment during shipping and storage, but packing this way takes time, money, and resources. What factors should you consider before deciding to package your own IT assets for disposition?

• Know-how. Proper packing requires training, process, and the right materials to do it right to protect the equipment from damage and ensure efficient shipping. Are your people familiar with best practices for packing IT equipment? If not, they will have to be trained. Do you have access to training resources and the time available to do it?
• Cost. Because proper packing for IT asset disposition takes time, it means you have to consider what the packer is worth per hour. Along with that, consider the cost of taking your people away from other tasks that might be more strategic to your company.
• Space and access to packing materials. Your IT assets are spread out among all your organization’s different facilities. Do you have the space and materials at each location for proper packing? Specialized containers can make packing easier and protect the assets. Packing materials take up space and cost money, too – space and money which might be put to better use.

It is very important to understand all the costs and risks involved with packaging assets yourself. The money you save by packaging in-house can quickly be overturned if your assets are damaged in transit. Your ITAD partner should provide you with detailed instructions for packing or offer services to pack for you so that shipments meet federal transportation regulations and you protect your assets’ value. If your ITAD partner is providing packing services for you, make sure it has sufficient processing locations to serve all of your sites and the logistical capability to offer the service level your organization requires at all of its locations.

Proper packing as part of an enterprise ITAD plan

Storing and packing your IT assets properly will protect them and will guarantee they’re in shape for maximum investment recovery. Proper packing takes planning, and it should be included in your organization’s overall ITAD plan. This is the programmatic or holistic approach to IT asset disposition. By implementing an enterprise-wide program with specific roles and procedures for every link in the chain, you make it as easy as possible for team members to do ITAD right, every time, for every location, which means doing it according to your standards and requirements. Protection during shipping is only one of your concerns about the ITAD process. Our IT Asset Manager’s Guide to Disposition discusses how a holistic ITAD program can respond to your concerns about ITAD costs, investment recovery, and integrating disposition data into your existing asset management system.