In 2019 I could order a hundred laptops on a Monday and have them imaged by the end of the following week. Last year the same order took seven weeks for one model and was declined for another, which had been withdrawn with a month's notice and replaced by a successor costing a fifth more. The rugged handhelds our depots rely on were quoted at nineteen weeks in the spring. A core switch for a new site took five months.
I no longer treat this as a disruption that will pass. For most of my career the equipment my department needed was a commodity bought on demand, and the only planning question was money. The market for components is now shaped by buyers far larger than us, including data centres buying memory and processors at a scale that moves prices for everyone else. Manufacturers refresh their ranges faster and support each model for less time. Trade disputes change a price between the quote and the order. I can influence none of it, and all of it reaches my service desk in the form of a new starter without a laptop.
So we have begun behaving like the rest of this company, which has run a supply chain for forty years and finds none of this surprising. We forecast device demand a year ahead from the headcount plan and the refresh schedule. We hold safety stock: roughly six weeks of laptops, a spare handheld for every twenty in use, and one of each network device we could not live without for five months. We cut the laptop range from nine models to three so that the stock is actually interchangeable. And I now ask our own buyers for advice, which they have found entertaining.
Stock ties up money and floor space, and holding it cuts against a decade of advice about buying only what you need when you need it. I have had to explain to finance why forty laptops sit in a locked cage. The explanation is the one our warehouse gives for any line with a long and unpredictable lead time, and finance accepted it far faster from them than from me.
Getting equipment used to be the easy part of running IT. I expect the next decade to treat it the way every other industry treats the physical goods it depends on, as something planned months before anybody needs it.
– Serguey Shinder
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