At a former Compaq factory near Glasgow, HPE Financial Services processes 100 to 150 pallets of discarded IT every day. ITdaily toured the Technology Renewal Centre, from the loading dock to the box for refurbished servers.
One hundred to 150 pallets a day, and not a single day of downtime in fifteen and a half years. Jackie Rafferty says it with the pride of someone who has known the building since it opened in 1987. The Head of European Operations at HPE Financial Services leads the tour together with David Coyle, Global Engineering Manager. Everyone wears headsets, because the hall is big and the group needs to be able to talk back. Photography is allowed, as long as Rafferty approves every photo, because customer data lies behind the 2.2-metre fence.
According to Rafferty, the Technology Renewal Centre in Erskine is one of the largest IT remarketing sites owned by a vendor. In fiscal year 2025, HPE Financial Services processed 4.3 million assets worldwide, 1.8 million of them here. The sister site in Andover, Massachusetts, does the same for the Americas. HPE also works with partners at forty locations.
From Compaq factory to Technology Renewal Centre
The site opened on 8 December 1987 as a Compaq factory. Rafferty and Coyle were already working there then, in a nearby hotel, two months before the first production line started. The first products were “lugables”, heavy portable computers with an orange screen, built on 286 technology. In 1990, 5,250 people worked there in four twelve-hour shifts. The line averaged 7,000 PCs per twelve hours, with a record of 10,000 in a single shift. According to Rafferty, Erskine was the most productive PC factory in the world per square foot in 1991.
In 2002, HP took over Compaq and moved production to Eastern Europe. Of the forty American electronics companies that once had a factory in what was called Silicon Glen, this is the last one left, according to Rafferty. In 2011, HPE Financial Services brought its European operations together here, with 50 people on 40,000 square feet. Today that is 200 people on 240,000 square feet. Rafferty has moved the fence seven times.
At the loading dock
Every job starts with a collection request, a document that records what is coming back and when. Material from across Europe is first consolidated per country in a network of nine countries, so fewer trucks are on the road. According to Coyle, Brexit changed less than feared: Erskine already did business outside the EU and mainly had to scale up its customs declarations. Printers travel badly and are worth little after five years, so they stay with vendors on the continent. Partners in the Netherlands and Germany process monitors and printers.
At the loading dock, an operator scans every pallet, and the customer immediately receives confirmation of what has arrived. Then the transport packaging comes off. The cardboard is recycled and reported by tonnage to the British government twice a year. According to Coyle, shrink wrap remains the only packaging material for which the industry still has no solution. Alongside the servers come toasters, microwave ovens and a “wally dug”, the porcelain dog that stood at the bottom of the stairs in Scottish homes.
Every pallet gets a unique barcode and is scanned at three points in the hall. Leased equipment waits in a laydown zone until the global reconciliation confirms that the customer returned what it leased. Equipment that customers own themselves can be sold straight away.
Eight work cells for laptops
The workplace line was built for desktops fifteen years ago and today processes 90 to 95 percent laptops. Eight work cells with a total of 600 positions handle 1,500 to 2,000 devices a day. The infrastructure can handle more; according to Coyle, the number depends on how many people are on the line. First the stickers come off. Then an operator opens the BIOS, because that holds data about the owner and the TPM module with the encryption keys.
Commercial sanitisation software, linked to HPE’s ERP system, reads the serial number and retrieves the job. Because nearly all drives are SSDs, the device wipes itself via its firmware in about five minutes, most of which is verification. Ten years ago, overwriting a magnetic disk took three to four hours.
After sanitisation, the operator assesses the device cosmetically using a fixed questionnaire. Those attributes go to the lease check, to the customer report and to sales, where traders bid per device. Of last year’s 300,000 workplace devices, 97 percent was resold. A laptop with a broken screen or a missing keyboard goes to a repair partner. A drive is only removed if sanitisation fails, and then receives its own asset number that remains linked to the device.
One server becomes 27 assets
On the enterprise side, Jim takes a DL360 Gen10 Plus apart. Processors, memory modules, drives, power supplies: 27 components, which he registers one by one in Dynamics 365 as child assets of the server. On average, a server yields 25 to 30 assets, and every component remains traceable to the customer who sent the server back. If the memory is sold separately, the customer sees that in its settlement.
The enterprise line processes roughly 150,000 individual assets a month. In the record month, when a supercomputer and several data centres arrived at the same time, there were more than 300,000. The warehouse holds more than 200,000 assets in stock, including “museum pieces” 25 to 30 years old. According to Rafferty, legacy components are scarce, and anyone who has to keep supporting an old line sometimes only finds them here.
Wholesale and Certified Pre-Owned
Laptops stand ready in boxes of ten, sanitised and ready for sale. After 45 days, the list goes to the remarketing managers, experienced traders who have wholesalers in the UK and Central Europe bid on the equipment per device, with the technical and cosmetic attributes attached. At one o’clock that afternoon, the picking of 8,000 laptops that had already been sold began. Ninety percent of sales run this way, and the buyer collects the goods themselves.
The other ten percent is called Certified Pre-Owned and is delivered directly to the end customer. Solution architects configure to order from their own stock and, if needed, from the global network. Each configuration then runs HPE’s factory diagnostics on a wall full of servers: configuration, firmware, stability and performance. The warranty is one or two years, limited by the date on which HPE stops supporting the product.
The last pallet of an order of 500 DL360 Gen10 servers stood ready for a French customer: gone on Monday, delivered on Tuesday afternoon. The black box in which a Certified Pre-Owned server leaves is made by a packaging company forty minutes away from the shredded cardboard that Erskine sends it.
Fathers, sons and forty cameras
Security consists of the fence, forty 360-degree cameras, infrared and vibration alarms, and three entrances that Rafferty manages himself. All staff are screened. Both contracts, lease and ITAD, require customers to sanitise their equipment beforehand. “Do customers do that?”, asks Rafferty. “No.” Hence the fence, and hence the separate networks that Coyle calls “expensive but necessary”.
On the floor, fathers work with sons, grandfathers with grandsons, and married couples. Rafferty has his own son in the operation and visits the staff first when hiring. “Hire for attitude”, says Coyle, and people learn the rest here. Thirty percent of the eighty office staff started on the floor. During the first Covid wave, Erskine was allowed to keep working as a vital sector and recorded not a single case. And where the finance person used to come and ask how much it earned, a sustainability officer now drops by every day, according to Rafferty.
Last year, Erskine received 50 customer visits, and this fiscal year already 32. According to Rafferty, every new customer who took the tour signed a contract afterwards. Meanwhile, Andover is testing direct liquid cooling for the GPU servers that will come back in the coming years, and Rafferty is waiting for another tenant in the building to leave so he can move the fence an eighth time.