How Brightwheel Spends 8X Less Time on Equipment Management for their Remote Team with Firstbase
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Long story, short
With Firstbase, Brightwheel Went From 100% Hands-On to Completely Hands-Off Equipment Management
In 2021, Brightwheel entered a period of hypergrowth as interest ramped up in its early childhood education software. The startup was adding headcount rapidly and recruiting from new geographic regions — all while pivoting to a fully remote business model.
It quickly became clear their manual IT logistics processes weren’t working. Brightwheel’s two-person IT team was spending hours every week erasing, packaging, and shipping 30 laptops at a time from their own homes. After experimenting with other solutions as a partner for offsite inventory management, they decided to onboard to Firstbase.
Now, Firstbase powers all of Brightwheel’s global equipment management operations. Through Firstbase’s physical infrastructure engine, worldwide procurement and provisioning are near-automatic. From the centralized, cloud-based dashboard, teams from IT to Finance to HR can access any data they need about people and equipment at any time.
By adopting Firstbase, Brightwheel’s IT team reduced the time spent on equipment management from 80% down to just 10% of their total workload. New hire onboarding is smoother, IT hours are freed up for strategic projects, and internal communication has been streamlined across the organization.
About Brightwheel
Brightwheel is the leading SaaS platform for early childhood education. With all-in-one billing, communication, learning, and site management tools, Brightwheel serves early childhood education center owners, managers, teachers, and parents. Brightwheel is the fastest growing and top-reviewed product in early education — a $100B US market!
The Challenge
For a Fast-Scaling Startup Going Remote, Hands-on Logistics Weren’t Working
At Brightwheel, rapid growth meant increasing IT complexity. The team was tech-savvy — until 2021, they’d managed equipment themselves. But as leadership prepared to scale headcount by 40% in less than three years, they knew dedicated help was necessary.
That’s when IT Manager Jonah Munoz was brought on, soon joined by Amisha Mehta, IT Systems Administrator. Today, Amisha and Jonah are responsible for equipment inventory, distribution, and management for a globally distributed workforce.
At first, Amisha and Jonah handled IT logistics operations from one of Brightwheel’s satellite offices. It was a big job — they spent hours each week getting devices erased, cleaned, and ready to go for new employees. Equipment management, including printing labels, manual imaging, shipping, and retrieving devices, took up as much as 80% of Amisha’s working hours.
The workload was intense. “At one point, we’d be shipping out 30+ laptops at a time,” recalls Amisha. “We were running new hire training every two weeks. There was a lot of juggling involved in getting enough laptops cleaned, erased, packaged, and ready to go for those new hires.”
The situation was already unsustainable. But then Brightwheel decided to take things fully remote. Now, Amisha and Jonah were trying to manage equipment for hundreds of employees from their own homes.
“We’d be bringing stacks of laptops home, or having dozens of packages delivered,” she says. “I’d literally have 10 laptops plugged in at once, racing to get everything erased and re-installed with our OS.” She’d often find herself cutting it close — shipping out laptops just days before new hires needed them for training.
Something needed to change. Amisha was spending too much time on device management — not to mention dodging stacks of laptops on her living room floor. So, Brightwheel decided to seek out a partner for equipment management and offsite inventory.
Brightwheel Needed Inventory Assistance — But Their First Partner Just Slowed Things Down
First, Brightwheel tried another inventory management partner, which offered the basic capabilities brightwheel needed: device procurement, management, retrieval, and storage. Plus, they liked the idea of growing with another rapidly scaling startup.
But they quickly encountered the platform’s limitations. “The main challenge we faced with the other partner was lead times,” Amisha explains. Brightwheel’s hiring cycles are speedy — they’ll often get new hires into training just days after bringing them on board.
But because their partner didn’t offer expedited shipping, Brightwheel had to change its own recruiting procedures, finalizing hires 10+ days before employee training was set to start. “That put a lot of constraint on our recruiting team,” continues Amisha. “Plus, the interface wasn’t what we were looking for. It wasn’t easy to navigate.”
While they’d addressed the equipment storage issue, this first partner had caused entirely new staffing bottlenecks. Amisha and Jonah decided that brightwheel needed a different equipment management partner who wouldn’t constrain their IT and HR operations.
Our Solution
Firstbase’s Integrated Cloud Platform and Infrastructure Engine Took Equipment Management Off Brightwheel’s Plate
“Even though Firstbase cost a little more, we saw the benefits right away,” Amisha says. Today, Brightwheel relies on Firstbase's cloud platform and physical infrastructure engine for procuring, deploying, tracking, and managing all its corporate devices.
Firstbase’s off-site inventory, procurement, and shipping functions take care of Brightwheel’s IT logistics — and get employee devices out of staff’s homes. But since onboarding, Firstbase’s automations, integrations, and centralized data visibility have elevated operations in ways Amisha didn’t expect.
Automating the Equipment Lifecycle
It took just two weeks to move Brightwheel’s equipment management operations into Firstbase. Setup was a breeze because the platform integrates both with Kandji, Brightwheel’s imaging software, and Rippling, their HR system.
Firstbase essentially merged employee information from Rippling together with device data from Kandji, creating a database of which devices had been assigned to whom. As new employees onboard or new devices are registered, this information automatically updates.
Now, Amisha can equip people through Firstbase in just a few clicks — whatever geographic region they’re in. “My favorite feature is the packages,” she says. “It’s so easy to go in, choose items for a specific role, and get them shipped out.” Once equipment is assigned, Firstbase offers the expedited shipping Brightwheel needs to maintain rapid hiring and onboarding.
When an employee leaves the company, Firstbase’s Kandji integration remotely wipes their devices without any work from Amisha and Jonah. Then, it streamlines the process of retrieving devices and getting them ready to be shipped back out.
Flexible Procurement, Adapted to Brightwheel’s Needs
Importantly, Firstbase lets Brightwheel stay in control of how they procure devices. They’ve been able to keep procuring and dropshipping their own devices within the United States, where they’re well established. This allows them to retain the steep discounts they’ve won through existing vendor relationships but still track and manage these self-procured devices through Firstbase’s platform.
At the same time, Firstbase handles procurement and provisioning in overseas regions where Brightwheel doesn’t have IT staff. “That was the biggest thing,” says Amisha. “Firstbase has made it really easy to be hands-off as we attract employees from different countries with different taxes and import laws. I don’t know how else we’d keep up with the rules around importing and exporting devices in unfamiliar regions like Brazil.”
Unprecedented Device Visibility
Obviously, Firstbase’s Global Equipment Management service makes onboarding and offboarding employees easier. But as she’s grown accustomed to the platform, Amisha’s realized she gets just as much value from Firstbase’s centralized dashboard and the unprecedented visibility it offers into her fleet of devices.
“With Firstbase, I have access to so much data that’s been incredibly valuable to other departments,” she says. “I can instantly answer questions like, how many devices are we actually using? How many devices are being recycled?”
That’s been especially helpful when liaising with Brightwheel’s finance team to make inventory planning and purchasing decisions. “Finance needs to stay aware of how much we’re ordering and why,” Amisha continues. “With Firstbase, I can easily export that data into a document, showing them we’re running low and need to order more devices.”
Firstbase’s Rippling integration has benefited the recruiting team, too. Before, recruiters needed to manually enter each new hire’s role and contact information into a spreadsheet so Amisha knew what equipment to send where. With Firstbase, that’s completely automated. Firstbase pulls HR and device data directly into the system — just by taking a look at the dashboard, Amisha can see all the new hires, what equipment they need, and where Firstbase should send it.
Streamlined Expansion Into New Regions
Firstbase provided invaluable infrastructure when Brightwheel was hiring a new cohort of employees in Brazil. The region was unfamiliar, but brightwheel still needed to maintain clear and efficient hiring and onboarding practices. As they started hiring in Brazil, device procurement and provisioning all happened from within Firstbase’s platform.
Amisha didn’t have to worry about Brazil’s laws and regulations — and she could trust that procurement would be compliant and as cost-efficient as possible. With Firstbase’s easy access to data, the finance team didn’t have to wonder, either. Amisha could easily share the numbers and give them the reassurance they needed to know for sure.
Highly Responsive Support
Beyond automation, there's a highly responsive team behind Firstbase.
When there's an issue, like a need for an expedited order, the team at Brightwheel pings Firstbase and knows they’ll get a timely response. They never have to worry that a problem will take a long time to get resolved.
The support is so good, Amisha describes them “as a branch of our IT team in a sense.” The phrase “IT concierge” gets circulated internally to describe how Firstbase helps to improve efficiency, including onboarding and offboarding, with ease.
Their Results
A New Era of Hands-Off Global Equipment Management
“Before, I spent 80% of my time just managing equipment. Now, it’s maybe 10%, and it’s all through Firstbase. It went from fully hands-on to completely hands-off and automated.” - Amisha Mehta
Since adopting Firstbase, Amisha and Jonah can focus on all Brightwheel’s IT priorities — instead of acting as an in-house equipment management team. “Moving everything to Firstbase has freed up so much of my time,” Amisha says. “Now, I have more capacity to respond to support requests and technical issues, and I can be proactive about making sure all our security systems are working as intended.”
But Firstbase hasn’t just made the IT team’s job easier. It’s also improving the workplace and onboarding experience for employees and speeding up communication across the entire organization.
“We’ve received such great feedback from new hires about how fast they receive their equipment,” Amisha says. “And our recruiting and finance teams are so happy that they can instantly share and access the information they need.”
Firstbase: Procure, Track, and Manage Every Device From One Platform
Firstbase is the only solution to combine an integrated SaaS platform with a global physical operations engine. From shipping to security to repairs, our platform is built to remove the challenges of IT logistics in today’s remote- and hybrid-first world — whether you’re a fast-growing team of 50 or a global workforce of 5,000+.
