RPM: A HYVE SERVICES PROGRAM FOR SCALABLE SPARES MANAGEMENT AND EFFORTLESS LOGISTICS
Maintaining datacenter infrastructure can be problematic when the industry faces challenges with keeping a stable supply of compute and networking components and other gear. Inventory levels and pricing can both be highly erratic.
Few if any industry parts providers can help bring stability to such environments, especially on a global scale as they are not set up to hold large volumes of materials. The logistics of on-demand worldwide shipping alone are beyond most vendors, never mind adding forecasting and regional buffer stock into the mix. Hyve brings reliability and simplicity to the management and delivery of IT components at global scale through its Rapid Parts Management (RPM) program.
RPM Core Components
The RPM program evolved over many years, spanning a host of customer requirements, systems and methodologies required to meet each customer’s individual needs. Hyve’s RPM program now actualizes these capabilities and experience across several key customer benefits.
Flexible Centralization
The RPM program applies to all computing hardware from chips and cables to complete rack systems. Typically, hyperscalers spare equipment or pay for the centralization, storage, and maintenance of that inventory from regional warehousing. Hyve lifts that burden from businesses. With near-proximity reach across more than 100 countries, Hyve can consolidate customer inventory within its own local facilities.
RPM’s flexibility allows customers to pull from spares stock and systems production interchangeably as changing conditions dictate. For example, if forecasts show the following quarter requiring more storage capacity and less demand for new systems, RPM could pull more spare drives from the total count allocated to servers — or vice versa.
International Logistics
Hyve is an importer of record (IoR) in over 50 countries and can prepare Commercial Invoices for dozens more. Having an IoR carries many benefits, including saving on considerable customs import costs. An experienced IoR will also carry the responsibility for ensuring compliance with all local and national laws when importing goods. This is essential in conducting global supply chain management.
Transaction Management
IT inventory management can easily scale into thousands of orders per month spread across multiple locations or geographies. Many customers find this load impossible to manage. There’s simply too much to manage in real-time, and backlogs in internal management only compound potential external supply chain problems. Datacenter upgrades and spare parts services are an example of a cumbersome process made simple with our transaction management.
Transaction management is part of Hyve’s bread and butter. RPM ordering services are fast and highly automated. Customers use a dashboard that provides real-time order statuses, precise shipment tracking, inventory levels, invoice updates, full reporting, and much more. This removes considerable strain from accounting and IT management while providing more useful insight into operations and resource flow.
Secondary/Optional RPM Benefits
Beyond its centralization, logistics, and sourcing advantages, RPM carries a host of other potential rewards, many of which focus on saving customers time and unnecessary allocation of staff to non-core tasks. For example, RPM services can include hardware serialization and pre-configuration, spanning from custom system builds to firmware tuning. This is easy for Hyve to implement at its point of supply, but costly for businesses to implement and manage on-site. Similarly, Hyve can also perform burn-in and other hardware testing before shipping, thereby saving substantial amounts of on-site labor, lab testing space, and avoidable returns.
RPM can also encompass return merchandise authorization (RMA) services. As with managing mass quantities of spares orders, keeping track of returns, replacements, and possible substitutions can vex any organization without an optimized RMA workflow. RPM can take over those logistics and manage everything from shipping dock to the manufacturer and back.
Similar possibilities exist with RPM forecasting management. As noted earlier, some businesses lack deep experience in tracking hardware failures and performing the analytics necessary for spares forecasting. Moreover, they lack access to manufacturer’s internal data on component failure rates and patterns. Hyve’s vendor relationships open doors to that data, as well as those manufacturers’ lead times, allowing a much more accurate means to creating accurate spares forecasting across multiple timeframes. Having this level of forecasting accuracy can be doubly essential when dealing with international availability.
Not least of all, RPM customers can elect to have Hyve handle their on-site support needs via our Hyve HUGS program. With this, customers can maintain fewer IT support staff, and the staff that do remain can devote more time to forward planning and implementation to drive revenue and bottom-line improvements.
Why Hyve and RPM?
All IT groups need a system for handling spares; most would benefit from help in developing and maintaining that system. Hyve has the deep resources, supply logistics expertise, and ability to support large inventory caches around the world, making RPM the industry’s best choice for spares and upgrades management. Hyve can accommodate volume levels from the smallest project to the largest, multi-geography hyperscaler infrastructures.
Even in today’s highly challenged environment, Hyve can help customers dynamically tune their SLAs to optimize the SLA balance between delivery times and cost effectiveness. Many hyperscalers carry costly warranty programs that fail to meet SLA delivery promises and make returns painful. With RPM, customers can dispense with such warranties and enjoy superior service levels to anything they’ve achieved with third-party providers.
RPM fixes the key pain points of spares storage and spares management, along with upgrade rollouts. On a base level, RPM enables enterprises to spend fewer resources on handling hardware. On a higher level, though, RPM is about implementing superior resource management that will help grow the business and enable IT to use limited resources more efficiently at every scale and global location.
