Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Don’t Forget to Check the Garage
Over the years, a friend of mine’s garage has morphed into a really big storage space. Holiday decorations, toys, old furniture…you name it and it’s there. What’s amazing is that despite the number of boxes and containers, he can put his finger on what he’s looking for almost instantly. It’s uncanny. He just knows where everything is.
When people talk about managing telecom assets, one of the questions I like to throw out to carriers is ‘What about your equipment in the garages? Do you have any visibility into those?’ Maintaining equipment stock in garages – or depots – makes perfect sense from the perspective of service delivery. When a critical service issue needs to be addressed, there’s no reason to waste time having a technician drive to a central warehousing facility for a part. The downside of course is that storing equipment at a garage presents another opportunity for assets to ‘fall off the grid,’ skew inventory levels and potentially have a negative impact on client service.
Making the most of a reuse strategy means gaining visibility into every corner of your ecosystem – garages included. When it comes to visibility, anything less than 'comprehensive' simply won’t deliver the results you need to maximize your equipment investment, drive down CapEx ratios and identify new revenue streams.
