Do end-user organizations understand the challenges facing an ITAD company going through a certification process? How difficult is it to roll out a certification?

Lecturer: Rike Sandlin
Rivervista Partners LLC
info@rivervistapartners.com
769-218-9825
Highlights:
• From an enterprise perspective, key stakeholders must be involved in IT decision-making for sustainability and security reasons.
• Organizations that are well-organized and have systems and processes that are documented have an easier path to achieving ITAD services certification than those not as prepared.
• Achieving certification requires a commitment from the top down of resources, including budget, timeline, leadership, and internal/third-party costs.
• Certification may require licensing from various bodies (R2, Siri, e-Stewards, ISO, etc.) with varying costs.
Rike’s assessment:
From the enterprise perspective, specifically the enterprise IT asset manager or enterprise procurement, one of the key elements is to bring more stakeholders together because you know the sustainability, security, financial leaderships should have a voice in the decision process. It shouldn’t just be an IT decision. And if you bring those other voices into the room and get their input, I think you wind up requiring certification because they’re all going to recognize the risk side of this and want to ensure that the risk is dealt with. Those organizations that are well organized and have systems and processes that are well documented, that are very good at their craft and have the expertise and the knowledge, they have an easier path than those that are disorganized and have not considered how to be professional about providing ITAD services. But in either case, it is a commitment from the top down, top levels of leadership throughout the organization in the ITAD organizations, to say “we are going to commit to being certified to this standard and we have a timeline, we have a budget, we have leadership that’s going to tackle these different issues,” but it is a commitment. Some organizations have the wherewithal to handle it internally, so they have the knowledge and skill set to be able to implement management systems and pursue certifications themselves, but many organizations hire a consultant to help achieve that certification. These consultants should have a methodical approach to helping guide the organization through the process of writing the procedures, implementing the training, implementing the record keeping, the ERP system requirements, all the different security requirements and all these different aspects that the certifications require. Typically, for a single facility it might be $20,000 to $50,000 commitment over the course of a year or so. That’s what I typically see out there. Some of that’s internal costs, some of that’s third-party costs, some of that is the cost of hiring the certifying body or the auditor, some of that is just the business costs of implementing the systems. Licensing from R2, Siri, e-Stewards, ISO, or Rios have different prices. But it is a big commitment, and I don’t want anyone to think that it’s not.