IT asset management is crucial for adding value and income to the organization. After all, IT assets are an indispensable part of the organization and help generate revenue for the business. And today, with most of the workforce operating from remote locations in today’s digital age, businesses must track and manage their assets better than before.
However, businesses find it challenging to maintain optimal visibility into the status of their IT assets, including cost, geographical location, the extent of use, configuration, ownership, etc. While unplanned downtimes, poor information security controls, and fulfillment delays are inevitable, asset management through manual record-keeping raises overhead expenses and may not help prevent asset thefts.
Simply put – an organization invests in assets to generate business value. When the same assets are mismanaged, projected returns decrease, and you no longer earn the same ROI.
So, what’s an organization’s journey from asset mismanagement to asset management? How can the business overcome the pitfalls of asset mismanagement?
From Asset Mismanagement to Asset Management
According to the PAS-551 standard on IT asset management, IT asset management is “systematic and coordinated activities and practices through which an organization optimally and sustainably manages its IT assets and asset systems, their associated performance, risks and expenditures over their life cycles to achieve its organizational strategic plan.”
Several factors contribute to poor IT asset management. Some of these include the following –
1. Inaccurate inventory counts
Organizations often struggle with knowing what assets they already own, the equipment and parts in stock, and the assets that need to be leased. Additionally, it isn’t easy to verify the list of assets with what is already there in the field. This is known as the FDH, or the Fat, Dumb, and Happy approach to asset management.
While capturing accurate inventory counts requires commitment, not knowing leads to compounding inefficiencies. Organizations waste a lot of resources (time and money) waiting for rush deliveries instead of repairing and maintaining what they already have.
2. Non-standardized nomenclature practices
When your asset naming conventions are inconsistent and assets go by different names, there is ambiguity in tracking, managing, and decision-making.
Non-standardized naming leads to incomplete reports and poor asset-buying decisions. Moreover, the organization may fall short of the asset when needed, causing rush buying, or it may have too many assets taking up a substantial portion of the budget when in reality, these assets are not required by the business at the moment.
3. Under or over maintenance of assets
Asset maintenance walks a slippery slope as it is considered a business expense often prone to cost-cutting. Proactive maintenance is often delayed due to strict cost-cutting measures. On the flip side, over-maintenance can result in higher costs of non-value-added maintenance.
4. Lack of communication between different departments
Maintaining a clear line of communication between different departments, including procurement, operations, and maintenance, is crucial to optimize workflows and productivity, reduce downtime, and eliminate conflicts.
Overcoming the Pitfalls of IT Asset Mismanagement
While the problems are plenty, there is a single solution: implementing a modern IT asset management system. A modern IT asset management software automates and streamlines the entire IT asset lifecycle on a single platform.
An IT asset management platform like ServiceNow Hardware Asset Management (HAM) simplifies six major IT asset lifecycle processes: order, ship, receive, deploy, track, and disposal, by automating the following processes
1. Asset Lifecycle Workflows
ServiceNow Hardware Asset Management (HAM) automates the entire IT hardware management lifecycle to create prescriptive, out-of-the-box workflows that do away with manual processes.
The system initiates workflows for asset purchase and transfer updates each asset record, and identifies leased assets that are due. Additionally, HAM automates asset disposal at the end of its useful life, including planning, scheduling, verification, departure, and confirmation.
2. Inventory and Stockroom Management
The IT asset management system creates asset records or configuration items, transfers stock from different locations, tracks them during transit, audits inventory, and schedules blind stockroom audits.
Moreover, the system can also reserve, assign, and recover loaner IT assets. Additionally, HAM analyzes hardware data and business processes and pinpoints improvement areas.
With ServiceNow’s IT asset management system, asset teams can account for missing purchase data, identify risks related to incomplete assets and non-compliance, and study asset incident trends.
3. Asset normalization
IT asset normalization comprises standardization of IT asset data by model name, model number, and manufacturer. The system leverages the ServiceNow Content Library to populate asset inventory with the end of support, extended support, end-of-life, and other information.
HAM automatically normalizes 129 model classes with information from several known manufacturing models.
How can Leidit Optimize ITAM for you?
Leidit designs innovative, scalable, and data-driven processes to automate and optimize IT asset management. With over 20 ServiceNow certifications, our experts at Leidit specialize in novel ServiceNow workflow solutions to help you overcome the pitfalls of IT asset mismanagement.
As a Premium ServiceNow Certified Partner, we can easily comprehend the complexity of managing a myriad of IT assets and, hence, provide rock-solid support at every implementation stage while offering customized role-by-role training.
To know more about Leidit and our IT asset management platform, please feel free to contact us and schedule a consultation.
