You (or your business owner) Waited Too Long!
There are several common issues that we see as an IT Managed Services Provider.
At times we identify issues within our processes and use it as an opportunity to improve. Often we will find a new and better tool solution via webinar, conference, or vendor product demo. But the most common issues we see relate to pain points we hear by talking to prospective customers—and we hear many of the same things repeatedly. Through this series of blog posts, we will examine some of these common items and talk about how you can deal with them.
IT devices, including servers to network devices to workstations to everything in between, break. It’s an unfortunate part of modern life, but a very real one. At times, we find we’ve ordered a lemon and have to contact the manufacturer, but much more often we find that machines that are having issues are quite old. This could be from lower (i.e. older) system specs having trouble with software or simply time taking its toll and hardware breaking, but tech issues lead to downtime, downtime leads to loss of productivity, and loss of productivity leads to loss of profit.
One can’t reasonably plan for every downtime occurrence, but age-related downtime is an easy fix (and can be easier on the wallet with the proper planning). One can create a tech replacement plan that outlines a replacement strategy, creating a variation of an insurance plan around eventual tech failure. Sure, it can be less expensive to see how long that 7 year old machine will last—until it breaks at a bad time. (This also can lead to frustration and “checking out” on the part of employees working on an old, slow workstation. We will examine that in another post.)
Many business owners will balk at the cost until he/she really looks at the cost of having an employee unable to work. Not only is the salary of the employee being paid—for a fraction of the work they’d otherwise be doing—but there is necessarily an opportunity cost of no longer gaining the same amount of revenue from the labors of that employee. Depending on the individual, this could get pricey—and quite quickly. An old server could bring down the entire office (or work from home force)…so we would have to multiply our business’s financial loss of the average employee by the size of the entire staff! Not only this, but there are costs that is more difficult to measure, such as failure to meet customer expectations based on the loss of productivity, and the associated retention costs.
When this is honestly examined, the results can be frightening.
Indeed, it is true that a good replacement plan can seem pricey. But in the same way home insurance is pricey, we have no way of knowing how much a house fire would truly cost without it; yet, for most of us, it’s an experiment we’d prefer to not conduct. Additionally, we are going to have to replace these machines at some point, and it’s much better for you as a business owner to choose the “when”.
Here’s some good news, though…it’s not an insurmountable obstacle. If you want some help with this for your business, we are here to do JUST THAT! We can help you manage your IT so that it works for you, when you want it. Click on the Contact Us link and let us know what is giving YOU a headache!
