During times of global economic uncertainties, maintaining business growth becomes less predictable and keeping costs optimised becomes a key operational imperative to ensure corporate profitability.
Despite these challenges, businesses drive ahead as going concerns and projects for digital transformation, likely at more reduced budgets, carry on to maintain competitive advantage.
Central to digital transformation projects is the radical rethinking of how an organisation uses technology such as mobility to pursue new revenue streams, new business models, or simply transform a very traditional manual-based task.
Procuring and deploying mobility assets such as smartphones or tablets for digital transformation projects requires strict budgetary planning and spend execution governance to achieve project ROI. As such, understanding the different options available to achieve an optimal level of technology spend requires a different way of thinking.
Mobility asset spend can be broken down into two categories:
1. Administrative use
2. Operational use
Administrative use
Corporate deployment of mobility assets in non-BYOD environments for administrative use will typically start with a procurement and deployment process of the newest and latest mobile devices bundled with corporate plans. These bundles will usually be part of a corporate mobile fleet contract with a Tier-1 mobile network operator (MNO) in their specific country locale.
Operational use
Operational deployment of mobility assets in field applications and harsh operational environments will typically be better served with second-life mobile devices, securely refurbished and commercially transformed into high quality mobile assets. These assets can be procured and deployed into mission critical business operational environments. In these situations, purchasing new mobile assets may be overkill when that mobile device's technical specification is much more than what is needed for the custom mobile application's rather lightweight resource requirement.
Make no mistake about it, deploying high quality second-life mobile devices from the right supplier for the appropriate business application will lead to more optimised spend that will improve corporate profitability.
Look for suppliers that provide volume-based high-quality refurbished mobile devices of varying grades and models, extended supplier warranties, and reliable customer service to support your operational environment.
In summary, adopting second life mobile devices is a highly viable alternative to the deployment of the newest mobile devices in harsh business operational environments where immediate wear and tear of these mobile assets will be extensive. Deploying second life mobile devices will lead to capital expenditure (CAPEX) spend efficiencies that will translate to cost savings straight to the bottom line.
About the author
Peter Hum leads the group enterprise business for CompAsia, a global second-life mobile fleet lifecycle solutions provider to consumers and enterprises. Peter is a spend management subject matter expert who has guided multinational companies around the world on spend management frameworks and methodologies and on how best to achieve cost savings through alternate solutions. Peter can be reached at sales@compasia.com.
