Business Challenge

In order to provide all of its field offices with broadband access, while decreasing telecom and datacom costs, a global life insurance company was rolling out a virtual private network (VPN) to its hundreds of general offices throughout the U.S.  The size of the rollout dictated a staggered deployment plan—a cluster of offices at a time.  As an additional cost management measure, the company decided to lease the VPN technology. 

Forsythe was engaged to supply, configure, and asset-tag the equipment before sending it to each site, according to the rollout schedule.  In addition, Forsythe leased all the equipment to the company, synching up each lease schedule with each deployment, so the client would not incur any lease payments pre-implementation.

While everything was running successfully from a technical standpoint, the sheer volume of individual leases was overwhelming the client's administrative resources.

Solution

To overcome the administrative deluge, Forsythe suggested a quarterly “lease line.”  A lease line is a leasing option that enables the client to add equipment over a period of time – in this case a quarter – to a single lease schedule.  At the end of the quarter, a single lease is generated for all of the equipment acquired during that quarter. 

Forsythe also continued to proactively notify the client as to when, according to their own rollout schedule, they needed to place the equipment order for each successive cluster of deployments.

In addition, the client is using Forsythe’s online tool, Go!Forsythe, to track all their asset inventory information, including leasing and technical configuration information.  With Go!Forsythe, the client can see what they have and where it is, at any time, and import that data to populate their own internal asset management database.

Results

The client’s business unit appreciates the financial flexibility.  Their project management group is pleased to discover they can truly rely on Forsythe to have right equipment in the right place, right when they need it.  And the procurement group is relieved with the ease of administration and reduced paperwork requirements.