CDW UK & Apple

CDW replaced all of its coworkers legacy iPhone 7 mobile phone estate with 850 new corporate 128GB iPhone 12s, funded via Apple Financial Services with a 2-year refresh cycle

Utilising a market leading mobile device management (MDM) toolset ensured that coworkers had secure access to company email, data and applications.

To help manage the process while stay-at-home measures were in place, the company developed and implemented a new intelligent automation tracking system to assist with distributing new devices and retrieving used ones

The transition resulted in a surplus of legacy mobile phones, which CDW donated to charities and sold to technology reseller and circular economy champion, Re-Tek

All proceeds from the sale of the old devices were donated to the UK’s largest children’s charity, Barnardo's

£2bn+ organisation, 1,300 coworkers across 7 sites in the UK
CDW’s Payment Solutions teams now have a global coverage with locations UK/International, USA, and Canada.

The teams are formed of experienced leasing and payment solutions advisors to provide financing options to best suit customers investing in Apple technologies and agnostic solutions.

CDW provides these services as a standard offering to support all customers through their decision processes to meet procurement requirements and to deliver best value and service.

CDW’s coworkers rely on state-of-the-art workplace technology to do their jobs efficiently and effectively communicate with and support their customers. However, after years of continuous growth, the company lacked consistency across its tech estate. CDW’s IT team were kept busy and incurred rising costs when having to regularly replace and refresh its coworkers’ workplace technology - including its estate of iPhone 7 company devices.

However, prior to the transition, work-at-home measures were enforced due to COVID-19. This required the IT team to modify its processes and ship devices to and retrieve them from individuals’ home addresses, rather than managing the process in-person in corporate offices.

Additional well-being measures also needed to be put in place for essential workers who continued to work in the company’s warehouses and distribution centres. Furthermore, CDW wanted to ensure the used and returned technology would be handled ethically and sustainably and would have value for future users and the wider community.

CDW’s finance and IT leaders analysed its options and concluded that the company could source a higher quality of equipment and save money by replacing all its mobile phones at once and by transitioning from an owned (CapEx) model to a financed (OpEx) model. Senior management agreed and plans were put into place for a company-wide mobile phone replacement programme.

CDW approached the challenge by first consulting with its coworkers through an employee survey to understand how they were using their phones and to ask them what replacement devices they would prefer. Based on the results, the company chose to work with Apple and discovered that by utilising Apple Financial Services (AFS) they could equip all coworkers with higher specification devices than originally thought.