How do companies maintain IT assets efficiently?

Are you paying too much for hardware maintenance contracts?

Businesses are asking their IT departments to be more efficient with their budgets – do more with less. 

With the new NorthSmart Hardware Maintenance offering from Northland Systems, companies are finding budget dollars from saving money when renewing and managing their multi-vendor support contracts. Through established alliances of over 100 OEM direct and select third party service organizations, Northland is now able to bring customers a tailored IT hardware support solution for protecting their hardware assets. 

Rather than automatically renewing support contracts after the initial factory warranty has expired, NorthSmart leverages the purchasing power of many customers combined with the competitive nature of having multiple service providers competing for their business. This competition enables companies to save at least 25% over "captive" OEM factory direct support contracts. Often times, the OEM factory direct service is "subcontracted" to the same third party service provider offered through NorthSmart. 

By cutting out the "middle-man" and going directly to the service provider, customers pay less for the same (or upgraded) service level agreement (SLA). 

Savings realized from NorthSmart will continue to grow as more devices are added to the agreement over the future months and years of the contract support period.

Why pay more for the same or better service? 

In addition to significant cost savings, NorthSmart centrally manages all support contracts via the Customer Support Portal (CSP) - a secured web portal at northlandsystems.com. Multiple support contracts can now be consolidated and co-terminated into a single purchasing agreement (PO) saving time and administrative costs.  Each asset is entered into the CSP which includes the item description, configuration, model #, serial #, start/end dates, support level (SLA) and contact information for easier management.  Centralizing assets into a single database enables customers to produce reports for budget planning, automated (proactive) expiration notification, opening and management of support tickets and requesting a quote or supplies.  Customers are now “empowered” to centrally track and manage all of their assets independent of location, service provider or support coverage dates or levels.  Here is a sample screen of our customer portal:

 

Through secured Customer Support Portal, customers can consolidate and manage their important contract information, place service calls, look up call history, track assets, plan budgets and renewals and request supplies. 

All of the information collected in the portal is exportable to Excel with the click of a mouse!

Taking advantage of this service is as easy as 1, 2, 3…

1.    Contact your Northland Systems Account Manager or go to www.northlandsystems.com to request a quote. 

2.    Northland Systems provides quote within 1 or 2 business days and customer places their order.

3.    Portal is populated with customer’s assets and a short online training session is scheduled.

The Customer Support Portal is complementary for all support contracts purchased from Northland Systems.  Contracts not purchased from Northland Systems can be added to the portal for viewing and managing only for a small fee.  Once the support contract is ordered from Northland, the portal subscription fee will be terminated.  The subscription fees will be audited yearly to verify accuracy.

Northland Systems gives organizations the ability to run their IT infrastructure in a smart and business efficient manner using NorthSmart – saving time and money.  If these business goals are on your radar, check out more at www.northlandsystems.com or call your trusted IT advisor at Northland Systems.

Bob Bernu - President, Northland Systems