If your Senior Systems Admin is spending four hours a week sourcing cardboard and taping up MacBooks, you aren't saving money — you're burning it.
Let's do the maths. A mid-level IT engineer in the UK earns approximately £45,000 per year. That's roughly £22 per hour fully loaded. If they spend four hours per week on manual device return logistics — finding packaging, coordinating collections, chasing employees — that's £88 per week, or £4,576 per year, in engineering time spent on logistics.
Scale that across a team of five, and you're losing £22,880 per year to a problem a managed service can solve for a fraction of that cost.
Your engineering team is your most valuable and expensive operational resource. Their time should be spent on infrastructure security, system architecture, incident response, and the dozens of projects that actually move your business forward.
Logistics coordination is a specialist discipline. Managing couriers, tracking packages, and handling damaged returns requires a different skill set to cloud architecture or endpoint management. Mixing the two creates inefficiency in both directions.
Beyond the direct cost, consider opportunity cost. Every hour your IT team spends on cardboard is an hour not spent on the security audit, the network upgrade, or the automation project that's been on the backlog for six months. Manual returns aren't just wasteful — they actively delay your strategic IT roadmap.
ReturnKits handles the entire logistics chain: kit procurement, dispatch, tracking, and receipt confirmation. Your IT manager logs in, enters an address, and the rest is automated. The only thing your engineers need to do is mark the asset as returned when the kit arrives.
Let logistics experts handle the cardboard. Let your engineers handle the code.
A mid-level UK IT engineer costs roughly £22 per hour fully loaded. Four hours a week spent sourcing packaging and coordinating collections works out to about £4,576 per engineer per year — or £22,880 across a five-person team.
No — logistics coordination is a distinct discipline from infrastructure and security work. Mixing the two creates inefficiency in both directions and pulls engineers away from higher-value work like security audits and system architecture.
Every hour spent on cardboard and courier coordination is an hour not spent on strategic IT work — security audits, network upgrades, or automation projects that get delayed as a result.
A service like ReturnKits manages the entire logistics chain — kit procurement, dispatch, tracking, and receipt confirmation — so the IT team only needs to mark the asset as returned once it arrives.
