Lack of Standardization:
A fragmented device fleet may feel flexible in the moment, but that lack of standardization becomes increasingly expensive as your organization scales. Without consistent hardware and configuration guidelines, costs compound silently across provisioning, support, procurement, and asset management.
The primary financial drain here is inconsistent provisioning. When there are no standard guidelines, devices are frequently over-specified or purchased ad hoc. A role that requires a standard business laptop might be assigned a high-performance workstation simply because that was what was available in the closet—or because the procurement process lacked guardrails. This leads to inflated per-employee hardware costs that deliver no additional business value.
Fragmented vendor management is another culprit, as it prevents economies of scale. Managing multiple vendors, models, accessories, and service agreements introduces inefficiencies and limits purchasing power.
How to Remediate:
Organizations should move toward role-based device provisioning. This involves establishing a centralized procurement policy that aligns device choices with specific role personas rather than individual preferences. By matching device types to actual job requirements, you prevent overspending on overpowered hardware while ensuring every employee has day-one readiness.
Additionally, consolidating vendor management allows for true economies of scale—enabling better volume pricing, unified support agreements, and more predictable lead times. This consolidation also reduces administrative overhead and gives IT more time to focus on strategic initiatives rather than managing one-off vendor relationships.
Unintentional Refresh Cycles
For many, the standard for refreshing devices has been the calendar: every three or four years, the hardware is replaced, regardless of its condition. While this approach offers a basic level of budgetary foresight, it is often financially inefficient. Auto-renewing “standard” refresh periods that no longer match real-world usage leads to two distinct problems: devices are either retired while they still have value, or they are held onto until they become productivity bottlenecks.
When devices are held too long, the “savings” of deferring a purchase are quickly erased by the cost of employee downtime. A slow, crashing device forces an employee to idle, disrupting daily operations and frustration. Moreover, aging batteries and failing hard drives lead to unplanned failures, forcing IT into emergency procurement mode where rush shipping and lack of negotiation leverage drive up costs.
Conversely, retiring devices too soon based solely on a date on a spreadsheet results in capital waste. If a device is performing perfectly well and supports the user’s workload, replacing it is essentially burning budget that could be allocated elsewhere.
How to Remediate:
The solution for 2026 is to shift from refresh schedules to refresh intelligence. Leaders should leverage endpoint telemetry and look at device health data to drive decisions. By monitoring the actual performance of the fleet—battery health, application crash rates, and boot times—you can identify exactly which devices need replacing and which can be extended. This proactive experience management ensures that you are refreshing assets responsibly without compromising the employee experience. It transforms refresh from a rigid capital expense into a dynamic, data-driven operational strategy.
Unused or Forgotten Inventory
One of the most pervasive hidden costs in modern organizations is “shadow inventory.” This refers to the devices that exist on the books (or worse, off them) but aren’t actively generating value. They are the laptops sitting in a manager’s drawer after an employee left, the spare tablets stockpiled “just in case” by a regional office, or the assets that were shipped to a remote worker and never tracked effectively.
Incomplete asset tracking and disconnected management tools lead to significant financial bleeding. First, there are the hard costs of storage and the relentless depreciation of hardware value. A laptop sitting in a closet loses value every month; by the time it is rediscovered, it may be obsolete. Second, this lack of visibility forces unnecessary purchasing. If IT doesn’t know a usable device is available in the Chicago office, they will buy a new one for a hire in New York.
This issue is compounded in distributed teams. When shipping is part of the routine and devices move across multiple locations and hands, the chain of custody often breaks. The result is a bloated asset registry where the physical reality does not match the financial ledger—a nightmare for audit readiness and tax compliance.
How to Remediate:
Organizations need to conduct a comprehensive audit to identify and eliminate shadow inventory. A modern IT Asset Management (ITAM) practice is central to making this sustainable. By integrating ITAM with your service desk, procurement workflows, and endpoint management tools, you maintain real-time visibility into asset status and location. This improves recovery rates, prevents unnecessary purchases, and ensures that devices already in your estate are used to their full value. When you know exactly what you have, you stop buying what you don’t need.
Unmanaged Reuse and Poor Redeployment
The final, and often most neglected, phase of the device lifecycle is the end. Unmanaged reuse and poor redeployment processes are significant sources of leaked value. For many companies, the process of retrieving a device from an exiting employee is chaotic.
Without clear processes to capture, sanitize, and reassign devices efficiently, large volumes of working hardware end up lost or sitting idle. The logistics of retrieval are complex: failed carrier pickups, slow processing times at the depot, and confusion over who is responsible for the return label all contribute to “device drift.”
Beyond the logistics, there is the administrative burden. When return systems are inconsistent, high-value IT talent spends hours chasing former employees and tracking shipping statuses—work that diverts effort from strategic initiatives. Furthermore, if a device is not wiped and sanitized correctly and promptly, it becomes a data security liability.
How to Remediate:
To fix this, organizations must define clear responsibilities for device care and timely returns. This includes streamlining offboarding so that device-return steps trigger automatically when an employee leaves. The goal is to optimize reverse logistics with a secure chain of custody. When a device returns, it should immediately enter a triage workflow: Is it viable for redeployment? If so, it should be sanitized and re-imaged for the next user. If not, it should move to a secure IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) process for data destruction and value recovery. Treating the end of the lifecycle with the same rigor as the beginning puts dollars back on the balance sheet and ensures compliance.