There is going to be a TON of debate over this seemingly simple phrase that I hear all the time in the computer business, "If it ain't broke why fix it?"
Well, there are several reasons why this is NOT a good approach towards computers in your business. Not all the time, but most of the time! My simple reply is "Disaster prevention vs. disaster recovery."
Computer hardware will fail, it's death is as inevitable as our own. Just like our own, we never really know when its coming, and hardware may last you a decade or longer, and it may last you a year or less. If you have a machine that you utilize daily for production work, think of it this way. What if you walk into your shop in the morning, and you have a full day's work lined up for that computer, but lo and behold it is gone and dead. How long will you be down without production? What files or programs have you just lost? The cost for recovering from a sudden failed system can be tremendous! If you need to have data recovered off a hard drive, because you didn't back it up properly, you could be looking at a minimum of $500 per hard drive, or $1,000 per hard drive for rush service! Plus, if you need to get a computer, how long will it take you to get a replacement in and set up to function and be ready for production? All that down time means you're getting behind. All in all, you're not only having lost production time (lost possible income and labor costs) but you might have costs for data recover, PLUS a new replacement computer: It's a double whammy.
Proper budget planning to replace out old computers can help minimize the risk of such disaster recovery because you're replacing aging hardware with new hardware which lessens the risk of failure. You're not having to replace a system when everything has ground to a hault or paying for data recover services. Additionally, your new system will have more likelihood of remaining compatible with the latest software and hardware available in the industry. This way if you do have to make repairs or upgrades to the system it will be easier to find more readily available parts. The next big benefit with this option is you are utilizing more powerful and efficient hardware which, yes, does translate into less time waiting on your system to perform certain tasks which can increase your overall productivity.
At one of our offices this last winter replaced out all of our computer systems. They were old systems, at least 6 years old running a Intel Celeron with 1 GB of RAM and a 160GB IDE hard drive. With those systems Flexi took a minute to open, and when printing a banner it could take up to ten minutes for it to output to the printer before it even began to print. Working within Photoshop and Illustrator was pretty much impossible as applying filters or working on larger projects brought the system to a crawl.
We upgraded them to new quad-core Core i5 systems with 12GB of RAM and fast SATAIII hard drives. Load times for programs was nearly instantaneous, and the system was able to RIP even large print files in seconds. We calculated things out and realized that each of the four designers there was able to actually work an additional fifteen minutes per day just by upgrading to the new computer. That might seem like nothing, but think of it this way. Each employee is putting in over an hour of extra work per week (five hours per week for all four employees) which totals 65 hours per year per employee (that's 260 hours for your shop per year in additional work performed.) If all that extra work time is billable hours, that extra productivity can easily pay for your new computers within the first year!
From what I can tell, our employees, working an additional fifteen minutes a day, with an estimated design rate of $80 per hour, will have an additional $5,200 worth of possible production time throughout the year each. Now, of course this is theoretical, as shops aren't going to "stop" billing a customer every time they have to sit and wait on their computer. However, it shows that having that little extra time saved each day can add up throughout the year if applied towards production products and can earn you a lot of money!
