Appliance Solutions’ Asset Recovery and Obsolete Inventory Disposition program helps the environment, significantly reduces capital expenditure costs
Symantec’s fast-growing Appliance Solutions business unit recently executed a winning and environmentally responsible strategy to repurpose obsolete inventory and reduce infrastructure costs. Joining us to explain more is Kunal Karandikar, Manager Business Operations.
Q: Can you tell us a bit more about your team and your role within Appliance Solutions?
KK: Sure. The Delivery Operations team of Appliance Solutions is responsible to establish a world-class hardware operation in Symantec. Internally, my team develops business processes, systems and tools to efficiently manage a hardware operation in software-oriented Symantec. Externally, we manage go-to-market programs that help Sales win customers and guide Sales through the process of taking an appliance opportunity from order to shipment. Additionally, my team measures and analyzes data across the appliance business and provides information and insights that help Appliance Solutions to drive an outstanding end-to-end experience for our customers.
Individually, I am responsible for various programs that map to my team’s charter above. Some contribute to top-line growth e.g. building Sales tools for customer acquisition. Others focus on improving cost efficiencies across the business, and an example in that regard is the Product End of Life business process, specifically Asset Recovery and Inventory Disposition.
Q: How did the Asset Recovery and Inventory Disposition program get started?
KK: In calendar 2013, Appliance Solutions implemented a voluntary Outreach and Upgrade Program (OUP) that offered the option to select customers of replacing existing legacy products with the latest-generation NetBackup appliance, at zero cost to the customer. OUP resulted in high customer satisfaction and was a successful program. However, Symantec received hundreds of legacy units as part of this program and that presented Appliance Solutions with a unique opportunity to recover value from these hardware assets. With the help of a vendor-partner in the USA, we harvested and refurbished to factory-specifications certain high value components from these returned legacy units e.g. hard drives, fiber channel cards. Symantec’s Supply Chain was then able to reuse these components as spare parts, opportune considering that obtaining additional spares would have been very expensive. The net result was a significantreduction in environmental impact by scrapping far fewer obsolete hardware goods, and the business unit avoided costs of approximately $1.9M related to Support and spare parts.
In yet another example, we recently managed the planned transition of a NetBackup appliance from a legacy model to a new one via the End of Life process. As the business accumulated the returned, used appliance units of the legacy model in different geographies, a special opportunity presented itself. As Symantec CFO Thomas Seifert mentioned recently, the company has approximately 530 R&D labs worldwide. These labs incur significant capital expenditures by purchasing hardware assets. To reduce the spend on capital expenditures, we refurbished the available supply of used and obsolete appliance hardware, and placed these appliances internally at R&D, Support and Training labs. The successful reuse of these hardware assets across the company resulted in avoiding $1.54M in capital expenditures, and demonstrated Symantec’s strong commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) while devising a creative approach to gaining cost efficiencies.
Q: These are both great examples. What future goals has your team set with respect to CSR, and how will you set them?
KK: For FY15, we will be collaborating closely with the Manufacturing and Supply Chain team in Appliance Solutions to set realistic and impactful goals for the business. Whenever we transition from an existing Appliance product to a new offering, we will evaluate and execute on the appropriate plan to reduce costs and help the environment.
Kunal Karandikar is a member of Symantec’s Appliance Solutions business unit. He can be reached at kunal_karandikar@symantec.com.