Welcome to allwhere Know How, an interview series that spotlights our customers and how they use allwhere. Today we’ll be talking with Robert Nakama, Senior IT Specialist at dbt Labs, the pioneering analytics company whose tools have defined the industry, about how allwhere’s procurement, storage, and recycling services have helped his team save on time and cost.

Tell us about your role at dbt Labs, and the services your company provides.

dbt Labs is the control plane for the data stack, continuously innovating the data engineering toolbox and analytics development lifecycle that defines the way data gets done for everything from dimensional models to novel AI. We enable businesses to build their data capabilities on top of a framework that provides the best of all worlds: speed, governance, and centralized control with distributed ownership—across multiple platforms. Over 50,000 teams use dbt on a weekly basis.

I’ve been at dbt Labs for about two years now, and my main objective is to make sure everyone has what they need to do their work. For example, we use Okta for our identity management and SSO processes, so I manage the software and access side — and then I have allwhere to help with the hardware side. Whether it’s access, laptops, onboarding, or offboarding, allwhere has been absolutely instrumental to our process.

What challenges were you facing that incentivized you to begin working with allwhere?

Our journey with allwhere started when we were still a much, much smaller company. At that time, laptops were basically ordered and delivered to either my or my teammates’ houses. From there, we’d go to FedEx, print the shipping label, and ship it directly to the new joiner. Then, if and when they were offboarded, we’d go back to FedEx, get a box, ship it, receive the laptop back, wipe it, and so on. The whole process was very manual, and once we started hiring more, we quickly realized that that kind of process absolutely would not scale.

A coworker mentioned allwhere to me, and after we tried it, I was shocked by how well it actually worked for us. Our onboarding time from start to finish used to be around a week, and now we’ve gotten it down to a few days — all completely outsourced to allwhere.

Describe the process you were using for IT asset management before you used allwhere, and how that process is different now.

As I mentioned, our process was completely manual previously. Laptops were being stored at team members’ houses, and the shipping and retrieval process was being fully handled by our team as well (including standing in those long lines at FedEx!). One key factor also has been that allwhere covers the regions where our international folks are. Shipping to EMEA and APAC, for example, used to be really difficult. With customs and paperwork, we were dealing with a lot of back-and-forth between our company, the end user, and the shipping company. We even had cases where the devices couldn’t be delivered, were returned to us, and ultimately had to be repurposed. allwhere has allowed us to both distribute and retrieve devices locally without any of the headache and extra time spent.

How has allwhere helped you save on time and cost? Do you store, resell, and recycle devices using allwhere?

allwhere has helped us ensure we can stay a globally distributed team that works smoothly and efficiently between time zones. We’re almost completely remote — we do have some regional offices, in Dublin, Austin, and New York, but the grand majority of our team members work from home or coworking spaces. allwhere helps make that possible by streamlining onboarding and offboarding, no matter where the end user might be located.

We do store, resell, and recycle devices using allwhere. We’ve done mass resales and gotten credit back, which has then helped us offset costs and in turn proactively upgrade the rest of our team’s fleet early. That was key during last year’s Coalesce conference, during which we were able to work with allwhere to configure all the laptops at the event. On the whole, our team functions better as a result of using allwhere.

What is your favorite allwhere feature? How has it added to your experience as a customer?

I find the dashboard to be really handy. I can log in and monitor all of my orders at a glance — what the status is, whether they’ve been shipped, whether the end user has submitted their information or not. And if anything is missing, allwhere can simply take care of it for us. Previously, that process would have been completely manual.

I also really appreciate the monthly check-ins we have with our account manager. Having a single point of contact like that makes everything really easy — no matter where we are in the lifecycle, I know who I can reach out to with any issues, and I know that I can count on allwhere to get them solved. allwhere is also great about proactively letting us know if we have too much inventory, so we can resell if needed. Cost savings are top of mind for any company, so we definitely appreciate the chance to receive those credits back when we can.

What pain points have you experienced with previous vendors, and how has allwhere been able to fill those gaps?

I think of allwhere as a sort of “cloud” for all of our dbt Labs inventory. With allwhere, we can store, distribute, retrieve, resell, and recycle laptops to our team, completely automatically and digitally. Without allwhere, my team and I would have stacks and stacks of Apple laptops in our own homes, and endless weekly trips to FedEx! It’s essentially our mobile warehouse, and it works great for us.

‍You can learn more about how allwhere can help you procure, deploy, store and retrieve all your employee hardware by booking a demo with our team.