How Preply Scaled IT Equipment Operations Across 3 Continents with Workwize

Preply is a fast-growing global language-learning platform that connects students with tutors worldwide.

Headquartered in Barcelona, the company also operates offices in London and Ukraine, while supporting employees across the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands.

With more than a decade of growth behind it, Preply now employs nearly 670 people, with headcount increasing by 13 percent in the past year alone.

As the company continued expanding internationally, managing IT equipment for a distributed workforce became increasingly complex.

Shipping laptops, tracking deliveries, and retrieving devices from departing employees required coordination across multiple countries and vendors.

To simplify these operations, Preply onboarded Workwize to centralize the management of global IT equipment.

The Challenge: managing hardware across a growing global team

 Before onboarding Workwize, Preply relied on traditional shipping providers such as UPS to handle device deliveries.

While this approach worked during the company’s earlier stages, it quickly became inefficient as the team scaled internationally.

The IT team faced several operational challenges.

• Manual shipment workflows: Each delivery required entering package weight, dimensions, and shipping information manually.

• Multiple tools for each shipment: Generating shipping labels, tracking packages, and resolving delivery issues required switching between several systems and email threads.

• Limited visibility into shipments: Tracking deliveries across multiple tools made it difficult to quickly identify delays or resolve issues.

• Operational overhead for IT: Managing global shipments manually consumed significant time during employee onboarding cycles.

As hiring accelerated, these manual workflows created unnecessary friction for the IT team and slowed down operational processes.

The solution: centralizing hardware management with Workwize

To address these challenges, Preply implemented Workwize as a centralized platform for managing the lifecycle of IT equipment.

The platform enables the IT team to manage procurement, device deployment, shipment tracking, and asset retrieval through a single interface.

This allowed Preply to replace fragmented shipping workflows with a structured system designed specifically for global hardware management.

With Workwize in place, the IT team can now manage device logistics more efficiently while maintaining clear visibility into equipment across employees and regions.

How the Workwize platform supports Preply

Rapid device deployment

Provisioning equipment for new employees now takes less than a minute.

IT administrators simply search for the employee, select the device, and initiate delivery through Workwize.

This replaces manual shipping workflows that previously required 10 to 15 minutes per order.

Real-time order visibility

Workwize provides full transparency into device shipments.

The IT team can view the status of every order directly within the platform, making it easier to identify and escalate delivery issues when necessary.

Asset retrieval management

When employees leave the company, Workwize enables structured workflows for retrieving devices.

This helps Preply reduce the risk of hardware loss and maintain accurate asset inventory.

Proactive customer support

The Workwize customer care team actively assists in resolving delivery issues.

In one instance, a shipment was delayed due to an incomplete delivery address. The support team identified the issue and contacted the employee directly to resolve it.

Workwize platform features

Workwize provides a centralized platform designed to manage the entire lifecycle of IT equipment for distributed teams.

Instead of relying on multiple vendors, shipping tools, and spreadsheets, companies can manage procurement, deployment, tracking, and retrieval through a single system.

Results: faster, more scalable IT operations

Since implementing Workwize, Preply has significantly improved the efficiency and visibility of its IT equipment operations.

• Faster device deployment: Tasks that previously required 10 to 15 minutes across multiple systems can now be completed in under a minute.

• Centralized operational visibility: All equipment orders and delivery statuses are managed on a single platform.

• Faster issue resolution: Proactive support from the Workwize team helps resolve delivery issues without adding operational burden to the IT team.

Infrastructure built for scale: Workwize provides the operational foundation needed to support Preply’s continued global growth.

What’s next for Preply

As Preply continues expanding internationally, the IT team is working toward further automation.

The company is exploring an integration between Workwize and its HR platform, Personio, to streamline onboarding workflows.

Preply also plans to automate offboarding processes so that device retrieval orders are triggered automatically when employees leave the company.

These improvements will further reduce manual coordination between IT and People Operations while strengthening asset visibility.

Looking to automate hardware management? 

If you are managing a distributed workforce, hardware management can quickly become a hidden operational burden. Shipping devices across borders, tracking assets, coordinating retrievals, and supporting employees in different locations often creates a web of manual processes that slows teams down.

Preply solved this by centralizing its entire hardware lifecycle in one place. From procurement to deployment to retrieval, every step now runs through a single platform. The result is simpler operations, far less manual coordination, and an IT team that can support a fast-growing global workforce without the usual complexity that comes with it.

For companies scaling internationally, the lesson is clear. When hardware management is streamlined, IT teams spend less time managing logistics and more time enabling the business to grow.