Evan Barash · September 30, 2009
Follow this series along by reading Part I: The Breakdown ...
So what is the real cost of Maggie’s minor incident which eat up her entire day?
Maggie earns, with benefits, $65K for the year. An average month has 22 workdays, minus 10 days for two weeks vacation, 5 days for personal time and 12 days for holidays throughout the year. So it’s 264 - 27 = 237 days. If Maggie has been there long enough, she gets more than two weeks vacation. But for this case let’s say she gets two weeks vacation. That brings Maggie’s daily cost to $275.00 per day. But that’s her cost!
Now let’s look at her lost productivity and therefore revenue. If Maggie is costing you $275 daily, then the work she is doing has to be worth at least double, or $550.00, and add in the time she took from others to aide her in her dilemma. It’s more likely that this one day cost you closer to $650.00 of lost productivity; plus the expense of the break / fix IT repair and the next day to return and put the machine back together. A typical Break/Fix repair such as this could easily run $700.00-$850.00 for two days. So we are looking at a cost of $1,450.00 for Maggie to have lost her hard disk drive and your firm lost revenue and additional costs.
Now let’s look at how we could have either prevented or minimized this untimely repair. For a monthly fee of $35.00, $1,450.00 would have paid for Maggie’s machine to be under maintenance for 41.45 months or almost 3.5 years.
What would the scenario have been if under Managed IT...
During the weeks before the drive would have been telegraphing it’s problems by occasional elongated times to make disk access to read data. These accesses would have been recorded in the event logs which would have sent an alert to our Managed Servers to have us look into this issue.
We would have either dispatched a tech beforehand to swap the drive going bad, early or late after Maggie has gone for the day, or have been prepared to roll out an emergency on site PC to replace Maggie’s machine. This would have got her working on the temp machine the moment she came in and then spend our time getting her old machine back up and running with no pressure and no lost production time. And most importantly, at a far cheaper cost, say $300.00 to repair/replace this machine instead of $1,450.00.