Colt is a global digital infrastructure company headquartered in London, delivering connectivity for customers who depend on it being fast, resilient and always on. Cistor has supported Colt’s Cisco hardware procurement for over 15 years.
The challenge
Colt turned to Cistor to help solve two problems pulling in opposite directions: speed and sustainability. IT equipment needed to be procured rapidly enough to keep Colt competitive in a fast-moving market, without inflating costs. At the same time, sustainability is one of Colt’s key differentiators - procurement had to meet ambitious carbon targets as well as commercial demands.
What we did
Cistor worked with Colt to rebuild its IT supply chain around three pillars:
- Demand forecasting - a process for forecasting future demand and enabling accurate pre-staging of equipment, so hardware is ready before it’s needed.
- A just-in-time supply chain blending Cisco Refresh certified remanufactured IT with new equipment, delivering shorter lead times, greater resilience, and no compromise on value.
- Take-back and remanufacturing of Colt’s existing equipment, extending its working life instead of retiring it early.
Colt also partners with Cistor’s sister brand, Circularity First, to embed circular economy principles into procurement - measuring the embedded carbon of IT products and services, comparing emissions between refurbished and new equipment, and setting targets to reduce the carbon intensity of what Colt buys. A joint teardown project of Cisco hardware between Colt and Circularity First produced hard data on the emissions gap between refurbished and new equipment, giving Colt’s decision-making a solid evidence base.
The results
The result is what Colt describes as the most sustainable IT supply chain in Europe - built without trading away speed or cost control. Lead time for new equipment was cut from ten days to just one, while annual savings of $1 million were maintained throughout.
This is a summary of a published Cistor case study. Figures and quotes are reproduced from the original document.
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