Global industry OEM: protecting proprietary technology across the continental US

Forty vendors, forty definitions of "destroyed"

End-of-life equipment left the OEM's sites carrying proprietary tooling, firmware and design detail. Each region had contracted its own destruction vendor, and each vendor returned proof in whatever form it already used — a PDF certificate, a photograph, an emailed line item, or nothing at all.

Where the exposure sat

The risk was not that any single vendor was failing. It was that no one at the OEM could answer a basic question across the whole estate:

• Which units left which site, and on what date.
• Which of those had actually been destroyed rather than warehoused or resold.
• What happened to the recoverable material once the unit came apart.

Two of the forty vendors could not produce a chain-of-custody record for the previous quarter at all.

One program, one record

Outlast replaced the vendor patchwork with a single managed process: scheduled pickups against a national footprint, serialized intake at receipt, witnessed destruction, and a downstream path for every recovered stream.

What the OEM gets back

1. A per-unit record from pickup to destruction, retained and exportable for audit.
2. Material recovery reported by commodity, so the diversion rate is a measured number rather than an estimate.
3. One contract, one point of escalation, and one compliance posture across every site.

The recovered aluminum, copper and steel now return to the same secondary market Outlast buys from, which is what moved the program from a cost line to a net-positive one in its second year.