How Steward™ Helped CDW Turn a 45-Minute ITAD Process into a One-Minute Workflow

For years, one of the slowest parts of an IT asset disposition deal was not always the work itself. It was paperwork.

Generating a customer-specific statement of work could take approximately 45 minutes of manual effort before a seller could even respond to a client. With mender’s Steward™ platform, CDW sellers can now complete that process in under one minute.

That single change captures what mender set out to prove with Steward™: the downstream side of the IT lifecycle, long treated as an afterthought, can move with the same speed, visibility, and operational discipline expected across modern enterprise IT.

For CDW, the speed is only part of the story.

Steward™ has helped turn asset data into a stronger sales and customer conversation tool, giving sellers access to recovery insights, reporting visibility, and lifecycle intelligence that support more informed discussions around refresh planning, redeployment, secure disposition, asset recovery, and reuse.

According to CDW feedback, mender has helped bring new business to CDW, grow existing customer relationships, and close deals that may not have been possible without the insights available through Steward™.

“Through building a strategic partnership with mender, the CDW ITAD program has seen improvements and areas of growth,” said Kate Moore, Sr. Solution Architect at CDW. “With the development of a platform that shows their commitment to information and transparency, and through their use of next-generation technology to turn around customer-specific contracts in minutes, mender has shown their determination to win in this industry. By taking the critique and suggestions of customers, sellers, leadership, and partners, mender shows its desire to not just perform but perform well.”

The timing reflects a broader shift in enterprise technology management.

As organizations continue investing in infrastructure refreshes, endpoint modernization, cloud migration, and data center upgrades, retired and decommissioned assets are no longer just items to dispose of. They represent value to recover, compliance to document, reuse opportunities to evaluate, and lifecycle decisions that require better visibility.

In that environment, speed matters. But speed without visibility is not enough.

Enterprise teams and sellers need access to accurate asset data, recovery intelligence, lifecycle documentation, and reporting visibility at the moment decisions are being made. Steward™ was built to support that need by helping teams move from fragmented updates and manual workflows to a more centralized, platform-driven view of the asset lifecycle.

“Organizations shouldn’t lose visibility the moment an asset leaves production,” said Robert Erwin, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of mender. “Our work with CDW shows what happens when they don’t. Customers move faster, recover more value, and manage retired assets with the control modern enterprise environments require.”

Beyond the reduction in SOW generation time, mender has also helped improve data access, enable proactive live updates for sellers, streamline client-partner operations, and save a client approximately two hours of manual data entry.

Each result points to the same idea: lifecycle data is most valuable when it is fast, visible, and available to the people who need it at the moment of decision.

Mender’s differentiation centers on Steward™, AI-driven automation, and lifecycle visibility. Together, these capabilities help sellers and enterprise customers access better data, move faster, uncover more opportunities, and make more informed decisions across asset recovery, redeployment, compliance, and secure disposition.

Organizations interested in learning how Steward™ improves IT lifecycle visibility, maximizes asset value recovery, and simplifies secure IT asset disposition can request a platform walkthrough with the mender team.

About mender

Mender is an enterprise IT asset lifecycle and disposition company specializing in GPU, AI compute, and data center decommissioning. The company helps organizations recover value, reduce risk, improve sustainability, and simplify complex IT asset workflows across global environments. From deployment through end of life, mender combines operational expertise with platform-driven visibility to help enterprises modernize how they manage technology at every stage and beyond.

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