GroWrk to the rescue: Recovering a laptop from Peru in record time
Mara Quintanilla
Nestled between the Andes mountains and the Amazon jungle, Huanuco is a city in central Peru with a population of around 200,000. Located about 155 miles from the capital, Lima, it's a stunning tourist destination but hard for couriers to reach.
If you ask our Ops team, retrieving a laptop in Huanuco was a challenge, nothing short of an adventure book.
Mission: Laptop Retrieval from Huanuco
Several weeks ago, one of GroWrk's customers requested to pick up a device there to wrap up an employee offboarding. They had been searching for a partner for almost two months, but most solutions turned down the service, claiming the location was too isolated.
Getting to Huanuco from Lima can take 7 to 8 hours on ground transportation, and if you lack local insight, the situation can quickly become a headache.
Why are equipment retrievals so difficult?
Employee offboardings are not always smooth, especially for remote IT teams tracking down and retrieving company devices. Workers may become unresponsive or reluctant to deal with the shipping ordeal. Sometimes, it's not even the worker's fault. Companies may have incomplete equipment policies or unclear processes that make matters worse.
This is more than a stressful situation. Company resources are at stake. Failing to recover a single laptop may not seem like a huge loss, but if the problem persists, it adds up.
According to a report by Oomnitza, 49% of companies lost at least 5% of corporate-issued assets during offboarding. Meanwhile, Gitnux estimates that an unreturned laptop from an offboarded employee can cost up to $50,000 when considering data loss, legal liabilities, and replacements.
Additionally, there's the risk of data breaches. If sensitive information is not deleted from company devices, it can pose a security risk for the organization or result in non-compliance. Data breaches are also expensive. According to IBM, the global cost of a data breach in 2023 reached $4.45 million.
GroWrk to the Rescue
Luckily, our client had GroWrk to do the job. Our team was able to make the laptop recovery in three days, saving them thousands of dollars and speeding up a lengthy offboarding.
Our team told us that the actual pick-up was also challenging. Communication with the employee was difficult as they didn't answer the phone, and we couldn't pinpoint their exact location. After much back and forth between the pick-up team and our operations team, they finally got a hold of the employee and recovered the laptop. It was nothing our experienced team couldn’t solve, but it was stressful nonetheless.
Many companies with remote workforces have teams spread across the world, often in locations far away from major cities. Delivering and recovering equipment is a challenge for a variety of reasons, but it is not impossible when you have an expert team like GroWrk to help you.
If your team is facing a similar situation, get in touch! At GroWrk, we provide end-to-end IT equipment management that can seamlessly support your global IT operations. Easily procure, deploy, recover, and store all of your IT inventory in more than 150 countries.
