Buying Business PCs vs Consumer PCs

This article is mainly aiming to provide IT departments overseas with an insight into how IT works in Japan.  It is also relevant for country managers new to Tokyo who are responsible for IT purchasing in Japan.

Buying PCs For Your Japan Office

Selecting the best way to buy and set up PCs for your staff in Japan can be confusing.

Let us walk you through some typical scenarios, potential pitfalls, and best practices from an IT standpoint.

Many of our customers are in small offices in Tokyo, and despite having large headquarter offices in different countries, are quite isolated from the IT department.

Before we go into detail, lets define : what is a 'Consumer PC' vs a 'Business PC'.

Consumer PC
A PC primarily targeted at the home market.  Often comes with an OS not optimised for business, such as Windows Vista Home.  The main features of the PC often include glossy screens and media options that are suitable for personal usage, but not relevant for business needs.

Business PC
A PC that has been designed for a business environment.  The PC comes with business software such as Windows XP professional or Windows Vista Business.  Comprehensive, quick-response warranties are included to reflect the business critical nature of the computer.  IT departments would feel comfortable standardising on this PC and rolling them out across the company, or across a department.

PC Procurement

When the decision is made to buy a PC for a local staff, these are the standard two choices :

Send a Business PC to Tokyo
The IT team at your HQ purchase a local business PC (generally with English keyboard and software), sets it up, and sends it to the Tokyo Office.

This is also a convenient choice if there are spare PCs available in the IT department.  The other advantage is this computer will be a business standard machine, which will have local warranty support in Japan.  There will need to be some local paperwork done to change the warranty to a different country before the warranty is able to be used.  It's a good idea to undertake this immediately after arrival, since it can take up to 2 weeks before the warranty can be transferred to Japan, and if you have a major problem with your PC and need urgent support, there is little time to be filling out paperwork and processing admin.

The potential problems with this approach are mostly language issues.  Local Japanese staff are often more comfortable with Japanese keyboards and language for Windows and for Office.

The best way around this is to create a multi-lingual image for your international desktops and laptops that includes support for Microsoft MUI (multilingual user interface) for both Windows and Office.  Once this image has been created, Japanese language PCs can be purchased and each user can select their own language settings for Windows and Office applications.

To enable this, you need to have the MUI suite available under your Microsoft licensing agreement.  Please confirm with your Microsoft representative to see if this is available to your organisation.

For full information about the Microsoft MUI kits, please look at this link.

Purchase in Tokyo
A member of the local Japan office staff purchase a PC in Tokyo, and asks the IT department for help to set it up.

Often in this scenario, a local Japanese staff will suggest purchasing a consumer brand PC, since they have a similar brand of PC at home and they are comfortable using it.

An advantage to purchasing a local consumer PC is that with a credit card, you can go to an electronics store in Tokyo and bring it back to the office on the same day.  Ordering a Business PC in Tokyo can take up to 2 weeks. Unfortunately, the benefits end here.

We have had a lot of problems with consumer PCs, and have found them to be generally incompatible with an international IT environment.  Here is a list of issues we have encountered :

• Warranty Issues Consumer PCs do not have comparable levels of warranty support.  With a Business PC, a technician can often arrive on-site the next day.  With Consumer PCs, you generally need to send it back to the repair center, and it can take weeks to come back.
• Image Problems Almost always incompatible with corporate image
• Support Issues IT staff in the Head Office find it difficult to support a system that is completely in Japanese
• Cost Local staff may not be aware of global licensing agreements and may purchase additional software such as Japanese Microsoft Office.  A Corporate PC with an image comes pre-installed with licensed versions of all required software.
• Reliability Higher incidence of problems, crashes and breakdowns due to less rigourous reliability requirements for Consumer level PCs
• Increased set up time  Every non-standardised PC needs to be configured from scratch since there are no images available for consumer PCs.
• Unable to re-use the PCs  If the Japan office ceases operation, the PCs are not able to be re-used in the head office since the keyboards and software are Japanese.
• Security and usability Consumer PCs come with a variety of pre-installed software that is useful for a consumer at home, but compromises PC security and causes considerable slowdown on the machine.

The Solution

There are many ways to approach this problem, but one that our customers have had a lot of success with is as follows :

1. The IT department overseas sends us a standard corporate PC image for a desktop and a laptop. 
2. We customise the image for Japan by working with the IT department to install the language support, and create a standardised Japan image. 
3. We then procure PCs from Dell, HP or your preferred supplier.
4. We use the Japan image to quickly and efficiently set up the procured PCs.
5. One of our bilingual staff trains the new local office staff on how to use the PC.

This method requires an initial investment of time to create the image for the Japanese Office, but is an excellent investment since it saves 2-3 hours every time a new member of staff joins the company.

If we can assist you with a similar endeavor, we'd love to hear from you.  Please feel free to contact us.