In the past, remote work was pretty much a perk reserved for a select group. Being able to work from wherever you wanted was exciting, but it often came with some uncertainty. And one reality was for sure: remote hires would need to wait for any equipment to arrive before starting work.
However, it wasn’t common to see devices that were supposed to be delivered before the start date arriving days late. While that might seem harmless initially, it created real problems behind the scenes to do with productivity, onboarding momentum, and costs.
Today, this scenario has become a pattern created by reactive, per-hire shipping. Rather than choose reactive shipping, let’s look at how a proactive approach supports cost control, employee experience, and operational predictability.
Reactive Shipping Quietly Breaks Onboarding SLAs
Hiring cycles are executed fast these days. The problem is that some IT teams still rely on a traditional approach to onboarding and IT asset management (ITAM), which relies on just-in-time provisioning.
Maybe some of them assume that the suppliers have stock and that no one starts on a Monday after a long weekend. In turn, new hires are stuck in the onboarding process, while different teams scramble and apologize.
Statistics from the Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) show that 86% of new hires decide how long they’ll stay with a company within their first six months. Four out of five workers say they’d stay longer with an organization that offers stronger onboarding.
Delayed shipping affects many things at once: productivity, the employee’s first impression, attrition rates, and security (as risks arise with emergency bring-your-own-device (BYOD) permissions). In the shadows, reactive shipping quietly adds to expenses, thanks to expedited shipping costs.
How Local Restocking Changes Everything
Proactive and local restocking, which is now easier to implement with IT asset management software, flips the economics of it all, as devices are already where employees are before they’re needed.
You’ll be thankful for the predictable onboarding timelines, global consistency, improved manager support, cost savings, and stronger employee engagement.
Here are some ways effective IT leaders put local restocking into practice:
- Hiring forecasts: They predict future trends by analyzing attrition rates and refresh cycles to estimate device demand.
- Warehousing as core infrastructure: Storing devices locally near employees speeds up and streamlines onboarding.
- IT asset management software: When synced with HRIS and procurement platforms, new hire events automatically trigger device assignments, and the same process manages offboarding.
Some stakeholders end up switching between warehouses and ITAM software just to successfully execute local restocking.
But what if we told you that you can do it all on a single platform?
How Dots Makes Proactive Restocking Easy
It’s easy for organizations and IT teams to embrace the idea of proactive shipping powered by onboarding automation and ITAM software, but the challenge lies in the execution. Our unified solution can connect all the dots, making proactive restocking practical and reliable.
Dots is your all-in-one platform for procurement, onboarding, offboarding, global IT logistics, and warehousing across global workforces. Everything you need for proactive restocking is centralized, so teams can have full control of the entire asset lifecycle in one place.
There’s no need to manually select vendors, configure devices, manage warehouse deliveries, adjust forecasts, and arrange deliveries. In fact, you won’t have to deal with ITAM software that requires you to contact warehouses on your own.
Book a demo with us at Dots to see how unified IT logistics, onboarding automation, and asset lifecycle management turn inventory from a bottleneck into an advantage.
