Business thinking - PC replacements
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Here is the last desktop a client ordered.
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@tirendir said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
If your users utilize Microsoft office alongside your EHR for instance, I'm fairly certain they would see a pretty sizable impact to attempting to use both simultaneously on a 5+ year old device. I'm guessing the EHR is essentially web-based access? If there's minimal multi-tasking, it's probably less of an issue for you than many. Although if there is a significant level of multi-tasking going on, I would suspect there's probably been a lot more machine-based delay occurring that users may not be complaining about because they just think it's normal perhaps?
I'm sure you're right - but as I already mentioned, non computer tasks prevent them from gaining any noticeable work gains from spending less time waiting on the computer. The primary gain they do get is less personal frustration, which definitely has value, but only so far, considering how those other non computer things are still forcing a delay. So now, the extra free time (which remember is only an extra min or so per hour) is spend gabbing about some BS that ultimately upsets a patient who over hears them gabbing about said BS (damn people are to freaking sensitive - true story.. patient called and complained that staff was talking about food - the patient was financially poor and because of that they were hungry.. the staff talking about food made her upset because it make them more hungry - wow, just wow...)
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@tirendir said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
I just paid $700 for new EliteDesks, and those were 7th-gen i5 with 8GB of RAM and SSDs with 3-year business warranties. >.> I guess I'm doing something right?
$700 is just over 80% more than $416.
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I got them through PCMG, but they were only a few bucks less than buying through TigerDirect Business, Newegg for Business, and one or two other outfits.
FWIW, there do tend to be times when computers tend to be cheaper to buy than others (typically as new models are released in conjuction with new hardware availability). Just likes cars, TVs, and Cellphones, I've noticed that there are cycles for product releases (they're much longer for business and enterprise-class kit) that last about a year in between refreshes. I presume for commercial kit, it's due to increased testing time and just because businesses replace less frequently than consumers, but I could be totally off on the reason(s).
I try to line up my purchases to snag the out-going version of a new hardware refresh, or the brand-new entrant to the model I've been looking to buy. Had I had a sliver more luck, I would have gotten those desktops for $620, but I couldn't get approval processed due to our grant rigmarole, and missed out by less than 48 hours. =(
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@jaredbusch Sure it is, but it's still more than half the cost of brand new computers every year.
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@tirendir said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
I try to line up my purchases to snag the out-going version of a new hardware refresh, or the brand-new entrant to the model I've been looking to buy. Had I had a sliver more luck, I would have gotten those desktops for $620, but I couldn't get approval processed due to our grant rigmarole, and missed out by less than 48 hours. =(
How much time do you spend trying to constantly figure that all out? Sounds to me like you sunk the savings just in your time.
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@tirendir said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
@jaredbusch Sure it is, but it's still more than half the cost of brand new computers every year.
Sure, but now you need a metric that shows that you actually get that much more work out of the employee for the send.
Plus you haven't included the IT cost or bench cost of deploying those new machines, the employee downtime from the transition, etc. Though you did mention the possible power savings so that's a bit of an offset to the these and other expenses.
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Far more in the past than I do now. It's taken me a few years to get my ED to agree to allow me to institute a consistent hardware refresh policy, so I've had to spend an annoying amount of time finding and buying new equipment as needed over the past few years. The patterns for business kit follow that of consumer kit, albeit lagging almost exactly a year in desktops with HP and Dell anyway. I could get Gen 7 Intel CPU-equipped business kit about the same time as consumers could, but almost exactly a year later, the premium hardware becomes the common-fare and gets your run-of-the-mill pricing instead of the premium hardware pricing much as happens in about 6-months in the consumer realm.
I spent many years around consumer hardware retail, but worked on the service side doing sales on occasion. So seeing the similar pattern wasn't too difficult or surprising. It just took me a little while to catch when the patterns do their transitions (seems to be mid-summer between typical new hardware releases and the big, consistent software releases like Microsoft). Hardware vendors want to divest themselves of the kit they've been producing for the previous iteration while they begin shipping the new iteration(s) that replace them. Either way, I've found that we can save a few K just by timing our bulk hardware purchases to somewhere in June or July.
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@dashrender I try and approach it this way: If my staff are waiting X amount of time because computers aren't fast enough, then that is time wasted because the resources I provided are inadequate. That waste is due to an inefficient solution, so successfully addressing that problem will result in eliminating the waste so long as I do so effectively. It's not about getting that much more work out of the employees by replacing their devices, so much as eliminating the guaranteed waste due to device inadequacy. Time spent waiting on a computer is time spent not doing something else if the time spent waiting is not long enough to spend accomplishing some other task, as switching tasks too frequently just drives up inefficiency.
If an employee has to wait on their computer to perform a task, that time is lost, period. If I remove the delay from the computer, then that time is no longer lost, hence I've saved however much time we are no longer spending waiting on the device to do its' job. As far as I'm concerned, IT has saved X amount of money in eliminating an inefficiency caused by IT's provided solution. If the employee doesn't make full use of the improvement, that is not IT's fault or problem. My job isn't to play taskmaster, but to provide the most effective and efficient solution for employees to get their jobs done as I reasonably can. I can save X amount of time by upgrading, which results in saving X amount of money. How they spend the time difference is not on me, but on their supervisors/managements' heads. IT is only responsible for what IT is responsible for, which is providing technical solutions that enable employees to work as close to their potential as possible. If my kit isn't slowing them down, then the problem isn't something within my realm of authority or influence to address.
As far as IT cost for bench and deployment time, we swap devices while most employees are not at their desks, so their interruption time is minimal if any. We also copy/paste shortcuts and personal folder contents to the corresponding location on the new device, so the user-end transition is minimal as well. If it costs my minion an hour per device, we're still netting about $400/year rough improvement in efficiency from IT's perspective when the swap is done properly, and still not including the electricity draw improvements.
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@jaredbusch Thanks for sharing your real world numbers. I don't order much Dell stuff. Here is my last HP order for client desktops:
This time around I'm just under $800, but it depends on if that particular model is on smart buy. Most of the time when I'm getting these bread and butter machines it works out that way.
For HP they keep their EliteDesk models available for 18 months typically, so once you settle on a model, you know you can reorder month to month.
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Something that Scott reminds of us all the time is, IT does not exist in a vacuum. If that aforementioned management can't take advantage of that time you've now provided them, then you are still wasting the companies resources.
It's great that you got out of their way, but if it's not used, the company as a whole is still failing.
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@mike-davis said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
@scottalanmiller said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
Pretty sure you can get any lease terms that you want, maybe not from OEMs.
yes, it's called a loan. (Which is what a lease really is.)
Exactly. Leases are just a specific form of a loan.
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@dashrender While I do agree, misusing time freed up by slow technology just isn't IT's job to address is all I was saying. That's for the rest of management to deal with amongst their respective departments, where removing the limitations imposed by the technology was my/our part of addressing the issue.
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@tirendir said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
@dashrender While I do agree, misusing time freed up by slow technology just isn't IT's job to address is all I was saying. That's for the rest of management to deal with amongst their respective departments, where removing the limitations imposed by the technology was my/our part of addressing the issue.
But it is... because you don't free it up unless there is a reason to do so, unless freeing it up is free. Only if it costs nothing to free it up do you just do it. Otherwise you look the entire business process to make sure it's worth the cost of doing it. Period.
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@mike-davis said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
All accounting issues aside, in the end I think the mass upgrade is more disruptive to business on all sides than the trickle replacement.
For those of you that have done mass upgrades, consider the process.
You select a particular model and config based on that days standards.
You have them all shipped and have a pile of PCs sitting somewhere.
They have to all be unboxed. How many fit on your bench.
You spend time (weeks?) working up your image.
You start to push your image as quick as your hardware will allow.
You start swapping out user machines as quickly as you can.
User questions start rolling in - you're still trying to move computers off your bench.
You realize you have to tweak your image.
You redo the image and reimage the machines that were already done.I did this for a shop last week. Everything done in one day, the whole thing. Even replaced the firewall, apps, basically everything. If you have a company that has weekends off, you can do this in a weekend.
NTG used to do this kind of work for Fortune 1000 companies. Bring in a team on a Friday night, do a crazy weekend and have an office on new hardware, OS, apps, configurations, monitors and more all before Monday morning.
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@scottalanmiller Yeah we still do from time to time over the weekend or at night
Then all the new tickets the following 2 days for users getting used to things 
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@dashrender I guess I'm not explaining enough of the specifics, which is something I'm guilty of oftentimes, and I apologize if that's the case. If there is more work to be done than is getting done, then there is automatically a need to increase the available labor availability to address that need. The only good ways to do that are typically to pay for more labor time (generally by hiring more people), to demand more labor out of existing laborers (still not free unless employees are salaried/exempt), or to as the saying goes "work smarter, not harder" by reducing impediments that are costing labor time. If I only replace computers every four years, but doing so will save something in the ball-park of $400/year, then I've saved the cost of the computers twice over in that span of time in user labor time that was up to that point unavailable for other tasks. It's no different than the robots vs humans argument. Robots and automation tend to cost a lot of money, but their costs to install and maintain are often significantly less than the costs of the time humans spend getting less done. Erego, most businesses have implemented or begun considering implementing automation for all sorts of things. Giving humans better tools so they have the capacity to be more productive is in the same vein, as it's removing hard limits to certain portions of their productive time.
In the aforementioned scenario, a faster computer would ultimately result in each user having just a half-day shy of an entire extra work-week a year of productive time. With 100 users for instance, that's a hell of a lot of opportunity cost that was just recovered, and a hell of a lot of productive labor can occur in that much time. Sure it will cost more in year one, but year two would result in saving thousands upon thousands of dollars, assuming that the organization makes good use of all the extra usable labor time. Again though, it's all based upon the assumption of the organization making good use of their labor. As you suggested though, if the business sucks, it's probably a waste of time.. but the problem was always much bigger than IT, and not something IT could ever address in the first place if that is so.
IT's job is just to enable the organization to do what it needs to do. Improving efficiency to free up labor time that is otherwise spent wastefully is only ever not beneficial if there is no additional work that needs to be accomplished, which I dare say is fairly rare. There is no such thing as zero-cost. Everything costs money, time, or both in some form or fashion, so there's really no reason not to reduce inefficiencies as long as the improved outcomes are greater than the cost to achieve them.
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@tirendir said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
If it costs my minion an hour per device, we're still netting about $400/year rough improvement in efficiency from IT's perspective when the swap is done properly, and still not including the electricity draw improvements.
And again you have no concept of employee cost. Did we not go down this road last time with you?
You said $416 savings and now an hour of someone's time only consumes $16?
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@jaredbusch said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
@tirendir said in Business thinking - PC replacements:
If it costs my minion an hour per device, we're still netting about $400/year rough improvement in efficiency from IT's perspective when the swap is done properly, and still not including the electricity draw improvements.
And again you have no concept of employee cost. Did we not go down this road last time with you?
You said $416 savings and now an hour of someone's time only consumes $16?
This is the calculation that he is doing: "If your users have to wait say.. one minute an hour, for 8 hours a day, every day of a work year just because the computers are getting old; even if everyone is making $12/hr, you are going to spend $416/yr per-employee to pay employees to do nothing but sit and wait at their PC accomplishing nothing (with which, you could almost buy a brand new PC anyway and save all that wasted labor money)."
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Scott's assessment is pretty much exactly what I'm suggesting, although a significant majority of users aren't likely to be getting paid anything nearly as low as $12/hr in most organizations, which skews the numbers far more in favor of replacing hardware versus not. My subordinate makes approximately equivalent to $16/hr. However I only used that number to make the math simple/easy.
