Service Desk Inventory Storage Improvement

We worked with the City of Boston’s IT Service Desk to reorganize their storage area so they could utilize, keep track, and right-size it more efficiently

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We organized the Service Desk’s space by using 6S and visual management principles to cut the time it takes to find equipment, reduce missing or aged-out equipment, and reduce the amount of money tied up in inventory

Names of Contributors: Nolan Brown, Elizabeth Rios, Jorge Figueroa, Angel Gonzales, Craig Weekes, Florian Hibroj, and Khalid Bachir

Year(s): 2024

Still have questions? Contact:
Analytics Team

617-635-4783

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1 City Hall Square, Room 703

Boston, MA 02201
United States

Why We Did This

DoIT’s Service Desk serves the entire city’s basic technology needs, like responding to technology errors, replacing equipment, setting up new employees, and e-wasting old technology. The Service Desk techs spend most of their time answering tickets from employees and don’t have time to do comprehensive inventory management. Instead, they would have to take a long time to search for the proper equipment when they needed it and had an ad hoc way of restocking, which sometimes led to too much or not enough inventory. Overall it was difficult to find what they needed, know what they had, and assets could slip through the cracks.

What We Did

We had two main efforts: organization and inventory management.

For our organization effort, we followed the 6S method:

Sort: We sorted each type of asset (monitor, laptop, e-waste, keyboards, etc.) into their own section
Set: We placed each asset type with alike types, placed more commonly used assets closer towards the door, and created a layout that facilitated flow. We also made it easy to restock empty pallets when necessary
Shine: As we reorganized we swept, threw out trash, and e-wasted old technology
Standardize: We put down tape to denote walkways and storage areas and labeled storage areas with what should go there
Sustain: Created posters explaining how to maintain the area and assigned senior techs to area maintenance jobs
Safety: We made sure people could fit in walkways, placed heavy things in the ergonomic power zone, and created a cart area so techs would utilize them more often

For our inventory management piece, we recommended a few significant changes:

Only storing assets purchased by DoIT and encouraging other departments to stop buying their own technology for standardization and planning purposes.
Setting Minimum and Maximum storage levels for assets so we never have too much (which causes storage and lost asset issues) or too little (which causes stock-outs)
Making storage visual by tracking inventory by the pallet rather than by the asset, since the number of assets on a pallet is standard
Scheduling the e-waste to be picked up when the box was almost full, knowing we’d fill it in the meantime

Results

After reorganizing the storage area, we found that the Service Desk saved about 600 hours per year of search time. Combined with our systematic reduction of inventory, we saved thousands of square feet of storage space and dramatically reduced the amount of misplaced or aged-out assets, saving the city over ten thousand dollars a year. Due to this reduction of inventory, we freed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of budget, which was formerly tied up in undeployed assets.

BEFORE