The Total Economic Impact™ Of Insight’s Flex For Devices

Technology leaders must support increasingly complex IT infrastructure that enables and drives business. Infrastructure outsourcing services enable enterprise organizations to hand off the complexities of IT infrastructure management to specialists and focus on their core business capabilities. These services provide consistent, reliable, and scalable IT infrastructure management and address the complexity of regional and local requirements.¹

Insight is a global IT solutions integrator that helps organizations modernize and manage technology environments by combining hardware, software, and services into integrated solutions that drive digital transformation. Insight’s Flex for Devices delivers end‑to‑end device lifecycle management — including procurement, deployment, support, and refresh — through a single subscription model, reducing complexity, improving predictability, and lowering the total cost of ownership. Insight’s Flex for Devices addresses common IT challenges such as unpredictable costs, manual processes, asset visibility gaps, and device downtime by using automation, near-real‑time tracking, and bundled lifecycle services to improve operational efficiency and employee experience.

Insight commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Flex for Devices.² The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Flex for Devices on their organizations.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed five decision-makers from three different organizations with experience using Flex for Devices and also conducted six online interviews. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the experiences of the interviewees and combined the results into a single composite organization, which is a global organization with $500 million in annual revenue and has 4,000 employees with a mix of Windows and macOS devices.

Interviewees mentioned that before using Flex for Devices, their organizations depended on manual, disjointed approaches to device lifecycle management that struggled to scale with organizational growth and distributed work models. Before working with Insight, interviewees faced time-intensive provisioning and logistics processes, limited visibility into device inventory and lifecycle status, inconsistent asset recovery, and excess inventory buffers to manage uncertainty. These limitations led to operational inefficiencies, high support burden on IT teams, increased device loss and overprovisioning, and delayed device delivery that constrained employee productivity.

After the investment in Flex for Devices, the interviewees’ organizations centralized and automated device lifecycle operations through a managed, end‑to‑end solution that improved visibility, streamlined fulfillment, and standardized recovery and support processes. Key results from the investment include reduced manual effort and IT workload, faster device delivery and replacement with lower employee downtime, elimination of extended warranty costs, improved asset recovery and inventory optimization, and the ability to extend device lifecycles through better data and asset management.

Quantified benefits. Quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

• Fifty percent reduction in IT labor required for device lifecycle management. The composite organization redeploys 50% of three FTEs’ time by eliminating manual provisioning, logistics, and asset management activities, enabling IT to focus on higher-value initiatives.

• Fifty percent reduction in end-user device downtime. The composite organization decreases average downtime from 48 hours to 24 hours for new hires and replacement devices, allowing employees to resume work faster and improving overall productivity.

• Elimination of OEM warranty costs totaling $300 per device. The composite organization replaces extended warranty purchases with Insight-managed repair and replacement services, avoiding approximately $300 in warranty cost per device while maintaining service levels.

• Six- to 12-month extended device lifecycle. The composite organization uses improved visibility into device health and performance to extend device lifespans, reducing unnecessary refresh purchases and improving asset utilization.

• Increase from 70% to 98% in device recovery rates and decrease in excess inventory from 10% to 3%. The composite organization increases recovery rates and reduces buffer stock, lowering capital tied up in unused devices and avoiding new hardware purchases.

Unquantified benefits. Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:

• Elimination of internal warehousing and logistics overhead. The composite organization offloads device storage, packaging, and shipping activities to Insight, reducing operational burden and freeing IT resources from noncore logistics tasks.

• Improved compliance and reduced risk exposure. The composite organization standardizes device provisioning and lifecycle management, enabling greater control over software usage, improving audit readiness, and reducing the risk of noncompliance.

• Greater standardization of device provisioning and configurations. The composite enforces consistent device bundles across user groups, reducing variability, improving support efficiency, and minimizing provisioning errors.

• Improved sustainability, asset governance, and financial visibility. The composite standardizes device recycling and disposition, improving auditability, ensuring secure asset retirement, and increasing transparency into asset lifecycle and financial outcomes.

Quantified costs. Quantified costs for the composite organization include:

• Subscription cost of $7 per device per month for device lifecycle management. The composite organization pays a per-device, per-month fee to Insight for end-to-end lifecycle services across 4,000 devices, totaling approximately $1 million in PV costs over three years.

• Ongoing internal labor for implementation and program management. The composite organization incurs upfront and ongoing staffing costs to support implementation and oversee the solution, totaling approximately $138,000 over three years.

The financial analysis that is based on the interviews found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $2.8M over three years versus costs of $1.1 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $1.6 million and an ROI of 144%.