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Every laptop in your company has a biography. It begins with a purchase order, spends a few hours being set up in a back office, and then travels to an employee who might sit in Manchester or Madrid. There it survives three years of video calls and the occasional coffee spill, until it finally ends its life wiped clean, refurbished or recycled.
Most of that story happens out of sight, and this is exactly the problem. When nobody owns the whole biography, different teams, suppliers, or countries write each chapter, and the plot gets messy. New starters wait for equipment. Broken devices sit in a courier’s van and old laptops gather dust in a cupboard, still full of company data.
Device lifecycle management is the discipline of owning that story from the first page to the last. This guide walks through the five stages every enterprise needs to get right, what changes when you hand them over to a Device as a Service partner, and the two numbers that tell you whether it is working.
Device lifecycle management covers everything that happens to a laptop, phone, or tablet from the moment someone decides it is needed to the moment it leaves the company for good. It is also known as IT hardware lifecycle management. It sits inside the wider field of IT asset lifecycle management, which tracks every kind of IT asset from procurement through maintenance to final disposal.
The lifecycle breaks down into five stages. Procurement decides what to buy and how to pay for it. Staging, often called device provisioning, turns a sealed box into a working machine with the right software, settings, and security. Deployment gets that machine into the right person’s hands, wherever they are. Support and swap keep it running and replace it quickly when it breaks. End of life retires it safely, with its data erased.
None of these stages are particularly complicated on their own. The difficulty comes from how they connect. A slow purchasing decision delays staging. Poor tracking at deployment means nobody knows which devices are due back. And with every handover between teams or suppliers, time quietly leaks away.
Procurement is where most companies think lifecycle management starts and ends. Buy good laptops at a fair price, job done. In reality, how you buy shapes everything that follows.
Buying outright means large, lumpy investments. In a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by devicenow, all four interviewees said their finance teams preferred predictable running costs to sudden spikes in hardware spend. One of them pointed out that the end of Windows 10 support would have forced a single, enormous upgrade bill if they had replaced their laptops all at once. When budgets get tight, the opposite problem appears. Approval processes become so strict that some employees in those organizations were still working on laptops six to eight years old.
Then comes staging. Every new device has to be unpacked, loaded with the company setup, enrolled in management tools, secured and tested before anyone can use it. Interviewees estimated this took around 4.5 hours of IT time per device. For one laptop, that is an afternoon. For a company refreshing thousands of devices a year, it is a team of skilled people spending a significant part of their week opening boxes.
Getting a laptop from a warehouse to a desk in the same city is easy. Getting it to a new hire in a country where your company has no local entity is a different sport entirely. Customs forms, import rules, local invoicing, and couriers who have never heard of your head office all come into play.
The Forrester study captured this well. One interviewee said shipping across borders had become so complicated that they hired a separate logistics provider just to deal with it, and that moving a device abroad could cost as much as the device itself. Interviewees also named wide geographic coverage and flexible business terms, such as local billing, as the reasons they chose devicenow.
This is where many enterprises discover they do not have one device lifecycle, but dozens. Each country has its own supplier, process, and spreadsheet. The way out is to turn deployment into one process with one standard, instead of a patchwork of local arrangements. Take OBI, for example. The retailer runs around 31,000 devices across 10 countries with devicenow, spread across its stores rather than centralized in one location.
Laptops break. They get dropped, stolen, left on trains, and drowned in coffee. When that happens, the question is how long the employee will be without a device and therefore unproductive.
Before working with devicenow, interviewees in the Forrester study said an unplanned replacement could take up to two weeks. Even with spare devices on the shelf, paperwork, approvals and shipping swallowed days at a time. The study’s model assumed that around 5 percent of devices need an unexpected replacement each year, with an average wait of eight days.
With a standard service level of one to three business days, that average wait fell to around two days, which can reduce employee downtime by up to 75 percent. One IT manager at a professional services firm, interviewed for the study, described a colleague whose phone gave up during a business trip. Thanks to devicenow, a new one reached him the next business day. Without that service, the manager said, it would have taken more than a week, which is a real problem for lawyers who need to stay reachable.
Fast swaps only work when stock, logistics and clear ownership are in place before anything goes wrong. devicenow offers next business day replacement in all key markets, so a broken device becomes a parcel to open rather than a chain of emails to chase.
The final chapter of a device tends to get the least attention. A laptop that has reached the end of its useful life does not simply vanish. Someone has to collect it, often from a home office, erase every trace of company data, and decide whether it can be refurbished or needs to be recycled.
Done badly, this stage is a security risk and a compliance headache. A forgotten device in a drawer is still a device full of data, and careless disposal sits awkwardly next to any sustainability promise. Done well, this process is almost invisible, which is exactly how it should be.
But this takes more effort than anyone might think. Interviewees in the Forrester study put decommissioning at around two hours of IT time per device. Combined with staging, the study found organizations can save up to 6.5 hours per device replacement once a partner takes over both ends of the lifecycle. With devicenow, returned devices are refurbished or responsibly recycled following international environmental and data security standards.
Running the lifecycle yourself is entirely possible. Many enterprises do, and with one country, one supplier, and a strong IT team, it can work well. The expensive part is rarely the laptops. It is the hours, the handovers and the waiting that pile up around them.
A Device as a Service partner takes a different route. Instead of buying devices and managing each stage separately, you subscribe to a service that bundles the device with procurement, staging, delivery, support, replacement as well as end of life. Employees or their managers order through a portal such as devicenow’s Lifecycle Portal, and the device arrives ready to use. When a Laptop is due for renewal, the old one is collected as the new one arrives.
Keep control, gain capacity. That is what it comes down to. Your IT team still decides which devices are used, which standards apply and who gets what. The partner takes care of the rest, from setup and shipping to collection. A head of digital workplace in healthcare logistics, interviewed for the Forrester study, said the switch freed up capacity to focus on local business needs. For the composite organization in the study, the model can deliver up to 89 percent return on investment over three years, at an average subscription fee of around €360 per device per year.
The Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study models a composite organization, a global company with 30,000 employees, based on interviews with four devicenow customers. Actual results may vary.
If you only track two numbers, make them these.
Onboarding time is how long it takes from a signed contract to a new hire sitting in front of a working device with every login in place. It captures procurement, staging and deployment in a single figure, and it is the number your new starters will remember. If people regularly spend their first morning waiting for access, your lifecycle probably has a gap somewhere upstream.
Replacement downtime is how long an employee is left without a working device after one breaks, goes missing, or is stolen. It shows whether your support and swap stage holds up under pressure. Count it in business days and compare it honestly with the service level you believe you have.
Both numbers share one quality. They measure the employee’s experience, not the IT department’s activity. A team can close tickets quickly and still leave people waiting for days. These two figures make that waiting visible, and once it is, it becomes hard to ignore.
Device lifecycle management rarely makes headlines, but it shapes how productive your people are every day. Every device in your company passes through the same five stages, whether those stages are well planned or not. The difference is whether one party takes responsibility for the whole lifecycle or different teams, suppliers, and countries handle each stage separately.
If your devices are spread across countries, suppliers and spreadsheets, it may be time to treat the lifecycle as one service rather than five separate jobs.
Source: Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by devicenow, January 2026. Results are based on a composite organization and may vary.
IT asset lifecycle management is the broader discipline. It covers every asset the IT department is responsible for and tracks each one from purchase through maintenance to disposal. Device lifecycle management focuses on the devices people use every day, such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets. When the conversation is about employee hardware, the two terms are often used interchangeably.
Most enterprises plan to replace laptops every two to three years. That was the standard laptop lifecycle in the organizations interviewed for the Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by devicenow, and the study’s composite organization assumed a three-year hardware refresh cycle. In practice, budget pressure often stretches it much further, with some interviewees reporting employees on laptops six to eight years old.
In a Device as a Service model, the provider is responsible for replacing faulty, lost, or stolen devices within an agreed service level. With devicenow, that means next business day replacement in all key markets. The provider also collects the old device and handles data erasure, refurbishment, or recycling. Your IT team defines the standards, and the provider delivers them.
