PlanITROI CEO Paul Baum speaks during an event celebrating the opening of the company’s newest facility this week. | Photo courtesy PlanITROI
This story has been corrected.
Training, technology and teamwork are the watchwords at ITAD company PlanITROI’s new $9 million facility.
The company relocated from New Jersey to Youngsville, North Carolina, to build the 54,000-square-foot Center of Excellence, which includes robotic automation and was custom-built for the ITAD firm.
Greg Saxon, chief operating officer at PlanITROI, told E-Scrap News that the idea came from wanting to create a space to share and highlight the processes the company has developed over the past 24 years.
“We’re really, really proud of the amount of time and energy we spend with our clients,” he said, adding the new space will help facilitate even more sharing and collaborative learning.
PlanITROI did a survey of the United States to choose a new office location and settled on North Carolina due to the convergence of technical talent, proximity to major airports, proximity to several large OEMs and two-day shipping to most of the U.S.
Tammy Lesch, chief strategy officer, said the community has also been very helpful: “Everybody’s been so warm and welcoming. We could not have asked for a better reception.”
Moving also allowed PlanITROI to customize its space, Saxon said, and carry out projects it had been eyeing, like making shipping boxes in-house with an automated machine that right-sizes the boxes.
“We came from a production facility in New Jersey that was about 45,000 square feet, but it really wasn’t optimized for us,” Saxon said. “We were really super lucky to be working with the builder here. I think there was only a concrete slab with Tammy and I first showed up here, and we literally planned every aspect.”
The facility uses robots to run parts out to technicians and is beginning a pilot project of a fully automated disassembly line for servers. In addition, PlanITROI has built its own AI tool that recommends a price for each refurbished unit.
“We get any device you can imagine coming in our door,” Saxon said. “It could be a Dell, it could be a Lenovo, it could be an HP and any serial number and SKU that you can think of, and any configuration of screens, hard drive size, memory, etc. So we need to be able to – in real time – understand exactly what’s happening in the market, both in refurbished and the MSRP space.”
As part of the grand opening festivities, PlanITROI also donated 40 refurbished laptops to the Franklin County Library System for patrons to borrow. Youngsville is located in Franklin County. Ben Eichler, operations project coordinator, said all the laptops are licensed with Microsoft Office, and PlanITROI has set up systems with the libraries to ensure that between check-outs, the laptops are wiped of saved personal information.
“If someone signs in to their e-mail or something, we’ll make sure that when they’re returned, it’s going to be all clean for the next user,” he said.
Lesch said the company is committed to creating a more digitally inclusive world, because one in five students lack access to a computer or Wi-Fi needed to do their homework.
Providing refurbished laptops is “really where we can help unlock dreams with our retired computing devices, and we can create a more digitally inclusive world,” she said, that “really enables people to learn and earn through a second life or even a third life on these retired assets.”
A path to excellence
The groundwork for the Center of Excellence was laid back when the company took on a Department of Defense contract, demilitarizing Panasonic ToughBook laptops in the early 2000s, Saxon said. Because of that contract, PlanITROI wasn’t allowed to export any material out of the United States and had to focus on developing domestic end markets.
In 2006, founder and CEO Paul Baum decided to commit to becoming a social enterprise, Saxon said, and to get “in the business of making profit to do good.” He started the Tech Tuesday Foundation and the Digital Dreams project, which “actively and aggressively work towards closing the digital divide with portable technology,” Saxon added.
Looking ahead, Saxon noted that parent company Nextra Tech, also owned by Baum, is “working very hard at the moment to do acquisitions.”
The new facility has capacity to process about 1 million units per year, and Saxon said the company is working to secure that much supply.
“We can’t get enough supply for the demand that exists, and that’s a pretty awesome thing – except for when you’re not a manufacturer of what you’re trying to sell,” he said. “I can’t order more raw materials. I can’t make more raw materials. I can only wait for folks to turn their laptops in.”
Saxon also sees PlanITROI as a global player. It operates in 87 countries, and “we have this vision – and the vision is actually starting to come true – where we’ll have a very similar operation in mainland Europe.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect number of countries PlanITROI operates in.