If you’re looking to buy 50 Dell laptops for your business or a 32-inch curved monitor, you’ll likely be able to read a few issues of Technology Update before you’ll read an email with a delivery date. The supply chain is horribly knotted and twisted, creating shortages of chips and equipment. For any chance of getting what you need, you need to ramp up your planning process.

Technology equipment is just one of the many product areas impacted by a variety of factors. Have you shopped for kitchen appliances lately? Or a new –or used – car? Are you trying to make any kind of improvements or renovations to your home? There are shortages of lumber, as well as gasoline and food products, because the industries cannot find enough drivers and other workers.

For all electronics, chip shortages continue to plague the market, leading to a classic supply-and-demand problem. Supplies are woefully low, and that’s driving up prices. And, of course, there’s no way to tell how companies and governments may be manipulating supplies to affect demand and pricing. It almost doesn’t matter because we all need to deal with the situation.

We used to be able to fill bulk orders for computers in a matter of days without any problem, but that’s no longer the case. Manufacturers, such as Dell, our primary computer supplier, now allocate products manually. We can’t get everything when we want it; we can only acquire partial orders and either deliver and install systems as we get them or hold them until we have everything.

That puts a premium on long-range planning. If your business is gearing up for a return of your workforce to the office or planning to update employees’ systems to work more effectively remotely, you need to pay close attention to myriad details. You’ll need to balance what’s available with how you might stage the deployment of your new systems. You’ll also need to look at your budgets and cash flow because you may need to commit money to equipment now just to have it in a reasonable time window for deployment.

We can help you with your planning. We can look at your equipment needs and see what the market could be for availability and pricing. That, in turn, can help you look at the financial impact of your planned purchases. We can also look at ways to extend the service life of your systems or improve performance to help you delay purchases you may not be ready to make. There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle, and we can help you fit them together. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to talk about it.