Lenovo is a global IT powerhouse. With more than 77,000 employees working in over a hundred countries all over the world, the company has built a strong reputation for providing high-quality solutions and services.
The majority of Lenovo’s global headcount are knowledge workers. These teams need rapid access to information to perform their roles effectively. So, it’s crucial for Lenovo to ensure that employees are equipped with modern, high-performing devices.
To achieve this goal, Lenovo typically refreshes employee devices on a three-year cycle—or sooner if devices are lost, stolen or damaged beyond repair. However, the process for requesting new devices was showing its age. Employees had to work through a series of complex steps, and it often took weeks to receive and set up a new device. In many cases, employees forgot to return their old devices, adding to the cost of the process.
Taylor Blackley, Americas/EMEA Deskside Support & DaaS Manager at Lenovo, says: “Our people would often just put their old device in a drawer and forget about it. What people tend to forget is that there are significant ongoing licensing and management costs for devices that remain out in the wild.”
Equipping global teams with AI PCs
Lenovo saw a big opportunity to streamline the rollout of new devices—a key objective, as the company was keen to equip its people with a new generation of AI-ready devices. As well as speeding up the process, the aim was to simplify the end-to-end experience and help ensure employees returned old devices for recycling at the end of the lifecycle.
In the past, Lenovo used a custom-built tool called Global Asset Management System (GAMS) to administer its devices. However, it was very hard for regular users to operate GAMS, which resulted in signficant amounts of time spent on troubleshooting. As a result, replacing the GAMS tool was at the top of Lenovo’s priority list.
Sophia Wang, Advisory IT Specialist and DaaS Manager for PRC at Lenovo, elaborates: “In Australia, our employees don’t even touch GAMS; the IT team places orders on their behalf because the system is seen as too complicated for non-finance people to use.”
Embracing an as-a-service approach
Lenovo is a pioneer of the Device as a Service (DaaS) model: an approach where enterprises replace traditional capital procurement of hardware with a single, transparent monthly fee for the devices and services they use. Lenovo decided to bring the benefits of its offering, named TruScale DaaS, to its own employees.
The Lenovo IT team worked with Lenovo Digital Workplace Solutions to make this vision a reality. One of the first steps was to build an internal service window on top of TruScale DaaS. Lenovo named this new experience Everything as a Service (EaaS), as it allows employees to manage the entire lifecycle: from requesting new devices and securing finance approval to shipping the new devices and returning the old ones.
Streamlining the experience
As part of the new EaaS experience, Lenovo uses its global Customer Fulfillment Service (CFS) hubs to customize devices and deploy the necessary software, after which they are shipped ready-to-use to employees at the location of their choice.
The new way of requesting and receiving devices includes cutting-edge hardware such as Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptops. The company’s first Copilot+ PC specifically designed for AI, ThinkPad T14s devices will offer employees the latest AI capabilities to elevate and accelerate their day-to-day work.
“Lenovo was customer zero for the new EaaS wrapper around TruScale DaaS,” says Blackley. “For us and other large enterprises, the service enables the rapid delivery of pre-configured devices with the tools and customizations each employee needs, chosen from a persona-based catalog.”
Deploying devices up to 98% faster
So far, around 5,600 Lenovo users in the US and 700 across Australia and Singapore have used Lenovo TruScale DaaS to receive brand-new devices, including cutting-edge AI PCs.
In the past, it wasn’t uncommon for employees to wait up to six weeks for a device to be delivered and then another week on top of that for the device to be configured and ready to use. With the new solution, employees can receive their new device in as little as a single working day—that’s 98% faster. Crucially, new devices are ready to use from the moment they are unboxed.
“This Lenovo Powers Lenovo solution is a major boost to employee experience and productivity,” says Blackley. “We also bundle Lenovo Premium Support, with three years of onsite repairs so that the user doesn’t have to send their device back to a central depot for servicing. We send a technician directly to their home or to one of our own offices to get them back up and running as soon as possible.”
Cutting costs and fostering AI innovation
As it expands Lenovo TruScale DaaS to more internal users, Lenovo is measuring substantial financial, economic and environmental benefits from the transformation. By improving the efficiency of the process and returning unused software licenses from decommissioned devices, Lenovo is driving cost-savings that it can reinvest in providing higher-spec devices to its teams. And by providing devices in a ready-to-use state, the company also saves on configuration and set-up costs.
“With TruScale DaaS and our CFS hubs, we leverage our own in-house resources to perform all the necessary configuration ahead of time,” says Wang. “We believe this saves around 50% of the IT-related cost of deploying a new device to an employee.”
Lenovo is driving substantial cost-savings at the end of the lifecycle, too. Wang adds: “With TruScale DaaS and Asset Recovery Services, we can recover 15 to 20% of the original device cost after three years by re-using or recycling parts and materials. That compares very favorably with previous employee buyback programs, where we achieved just 3% of that original cost.”
But for Lenovo, the biggest advantage of TruScale DaaS is employee enablement. By accelerating the global rollout of AI-powered devices, the company is empowering its teams to better support its millions of customers all over the world.