For as long as anybody could remember, our laptop refresh worked as a cascade. Every year we bought around three hundred new machines and they went to head office first, roughly in order of grade. The machines they replaced were wiped and sent to the depots, and the depots' oldest machines were scrapped. It looked thrifty, and the finance director liked it, because every laptop worked for six or seven years before anybody threw it away.
I only questioned it when I sorted a year of hardware tickets by where the device sat rather than by model. Depot machines produced three times as many tickets per device as head office machines, and the reason was not mysterious. A head office laptop is used by one person for eight hours and spends the evening in a bag. The transport office terminal at a depot is used by three planners across three shifts, is never switched off, sits beside a roller door, and is between six and seven years old because that is where the cascade ends. Out of warranty, a failed one waits for a spare from head office, and at a depot a planner without a terminal means trailers without a plan.
So the oldest equipment in the company was doing the most hours, on the work that stops vehicles when it stops, while the newest was mostly running email and spreadsheets in meeting rooms. Nobody had decided that. It was a side effect of refreshing people by grade rather than machines by use.
We now refresh by measured hours of use and by what stops when the device stops. Shared shift terminals at depots are first in the queue and are replaced at four years whatever their condition. Single user office laptops run to five, and the cascade has ended, because a machine that is too old for a director is too old for a planner. Two senior colleagues objected, and one of them withdrew the objection after spending a night shift in a transport office with us.
Depot hardware tickets per device fell by about half in the first year, and the number of laptops we buy has hardly changed.
The cascade sorted our people by seniority and our equipment by nothing at all. Allocating by use cost no more, and it put the new machines where the work is done.
– Serguey Shinder
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