Some Highlights:
- Large global organizations must consider the cost and complexity of managing autonomous versus standardized approaches for ITAD
- Leveraging a large US-based ITAD with partners across multiple countries may be more beneficial than managing multiple vendors
- Establishing direct relationships with ITADs in each respective country may be advantageous if there is sufficient asset quantity to make it worth the effort
- Financial considerations such as value recovery, pricing, auditing, middleman costs, and personnel availability need to be considered to make the best decision.
Todd’s assessment:
Todd Zegers,
President & CEO
Circular Integrity
info@CircularIntegrity.com
(949)346-1683
There is so much complexity and moving parts to that question, because if you think about it, if you’re a large global organization, with a large operation in the US and maybe a couple smaller operations in Europe and maybe a location in Singapore, and depending on the size of those locations that are outside the US, there’s going to be times when the amount of value, cost or headache to try to manage some of those smaller sites as kind of autonomous regions versus on the holistic global standardized approach, the juices aren’t worth the squeeze. Because there’s not a lot of value recovery out of that into small spent.
Do you really want to try to have four different vendors in four different countries outside the US that you have to send your people out to audit those facilities and make sure the itad vendor is doing the right things and to stay on top of that regularly? Meanwhile, you could use maybe a large US-based ITAD that may have their own presence there, and maybe they even use partners in those areas, and they can handle that for you because they’re already auditing some of those partners. In those areas and at the end of the day, if they’re sending those partners who you’d want to use directly, if they’re already sending them a lot volume, chances are the pricing that they would get to provide those services back to you as they would get a discount, so when they put their small margin on top of that, net-net, you’re not going to save much or get more money back. In fact, you may even do better off leveraging a large ITAD provider who has those partners, and that takes out you having to go audit and manage them yourself, to set up all the billing situations with some of those, because now you can get consolidated billing potentially from that kind of single throat to choke. But then you also think if I’m managing 5 vendors versus one if I ever get audited or I need to try to find the audit reports or certificates, now I have to go to 5 different vendors to aggregate all that data to try to manually do that versus going to my one provider here who pulls all that into that single pane of glass, and so it really adds value.
So I think that’s a scenario where it may not make sense. Now If you’ve got a large operation in the US, a large operation in the UK, a large operation in Singapore and a large operation in Brazil, for example, right, it may be worthwhile for you to spend the time and effort to get four different providers set up because of the geographic concerns, you are going to get more value recovery back because you are cutting out the middleman. We have enough volume at stake to where these direct ITADs in those countries are going to give you beneficial pricing or higher value recovery and you’re not having that person in the middle. So again, it really depends on your type of assets, the quantities of those assets. Also do you have people in the region that are capable to go out and audit one of those facilities or do you have to fly someone in? Right. So again, it really depends as there are a lot of different financial considerations you need to take into account to make the best decision for your organization.
