The end of Customer Premise Equipment headaches

When your client is waiting on customer premise equipment (CPE) to arrive – preconfigured and imaged as specified – then there simply shouldn’t be any such thing as ‘margin for error’.
Here’s how to consign the phrase to history.

Any operation with multiple variables is risky. No matter how buttoned-down or regularly and successfully completed the operation is, there’s always that nagging possibility that something can go wrong at any one stage. Then the problem can go racing through every strand of the operation to bring it, if not to a grinding halt, probably to the attention of the waiting client. Not the sort of attention you want.

You want it when?

Delivering CPE requires project management and attention to detail. It’s a time-consuming job when you consider the many different pieces of hardware that can be involved. Routers, POS terminals, Access Points or edge servers all need some level of intervention, kitting or engineering time.

On top of that, there is a lot of liaising, organising, getting ducks in rows; suppliers with their own priority lists to take care of, which might not always coincide with yours. They have delivery schedules to worry about, inventory to control, resources to assign or re-assign.

It’s a breeding ground for things to go wrong, or not to go at the galloping pace you need them to because that’s the pace your clients demand. When the equipment does arrive on site, another variable comes into play; the time the engineer needs for installation can impact upon the cost of meeting contract SLAs.

There are three main considerations in driving successful and profitable CPE projects which need to be firmly addressed to meet client expectations, stay ahead of the game, and optimise profitability.

The three core pillars of successful CPE projects

• Capex reduction
  Holding stock and preconfiguring equipment prior to delivery to a client site can be expensive. Each stage in the process is a cost centre: Physical stock-holding, picking, engineering time to preconfigure and image the devices, packing, and shipping. Imagine if you could remove that from your business in one fell swoop. Wouldn’t that relieve a few pressure points that distract your attention and resources from core business activities? There are better things you can do with your money.At Excotek we enable our customers to reduce Capex by transferring the more complex and labour-intensive aspects of their operation over to us. We specialise in getting these things done, freeing up our customers’ valuable engineering resource to focus on supporting their clients; with vision, innovation, and value add services.Our services support both bulk stock-holding for on-going projects or ad hoc single configuration builds. Should an engineer be needed on-site, we can preconfigure the CPE so that site engineering time is kept to an absolute minimum.
• Management
  Regardless of the cost and operational-effectiveness, management and control has to stay in your hands, through complete and real-time visibility as well as the ability to interject in the project process at any time deemed necessary. We’ve made all stages of project management seamless; from rapid sourcing of equipment (often already in stock at our warehouse) through to configuration, testing, despatch, and even installation if required.Our Global View web portal provides a single pane of glass view; from stock-holding, to creating build-and-despatch requests, through to tracking despatch and delivery. Global View affords full tracking and traceability, with serial number tracking down to component level, generation, and placement of asset tracking tags.From the comfort of your own device
  • Every job stage visible: When a project is agreed, we configure all resources on Global View within 24 hours. The project is then ready to receive products from our own extensive inventory, our partners’ current stock-holding, or from third-party suppliers. All data is visible in real-time.
  • Lifecycle management: As well as the outbound process, our CPE services support complete lifecycle management when required, including reverse logistics; collection of CPE through to grading returned stock for refresh or refurb, and moving into a graded stock-clearance system.This enables you to realise retained value in the returned stock, or pass the product through to a fully traceable Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) disposal process, including certified data destruction and serial number tracking.
  • Secure operation: Our bi-directional API can integrate the submission of job requests directly from your systems. Access to the web portal is protected with 2-Factor authentication. All projects are covered with a Service Level Agreement that is fully reportable against performance delivered. It’s all viewable from any device, anywhere.
• Project planning and implementation
  We’re very hands-on at Excotek, working closely with our customers at the project planning stage, to maximise efficiencies and remove complexity. We deliver configured solutions to the client premises.

With Global View and CPE services you can manage multiple phases of a project in a click here and a click there, as opposed to having to be hands-on yourself, dependant on third party supply chains, watching your people perform mundane tasks when they could be adding far greater value to your business.

This is the essence of just-in-time CPE fulfilment; taking away the stress and investment. Giving you the agility to respond rapidly to customer requirements. Putting you in total control through simplified points of contact, integrated systems and defined responsibilities and accountability. Get ahead of the game, make margin for error yesterday’s worry, and tomorrow all about client satisfaction.

To find out more about doing things faster today, get in touch at [email protected].