Executive Summary
Specialty Building Products replaced spreadsheet-based asset tracking with AssetSonar to gain visibility across 8,300 assets and 4,000 users. By integrating with Intune and automating asset tracking, the team now saves several hours weekly, cuts offboarding time by 75%, and avoids approximately $5,000 in monthly hardware costs, while significantly improving confidence in their IT asset data.
From spreadsheets to seamless asset tracking
Jeremy Schmit, IT Manager at Specialty Building Products, is responsible for acquiring IT assets and determining the appropriate equipment models and resources for laptops, mobile devices, accessories, and printers.
When Jeremy looked across the company’s multiple locations and brands, he saw a problem hiding in plain sight: nobody could confidently say who had which IT equipment, or where it was.
“Before AssetSonar, it was essentially just a spreadsheet. The problem with that is you have to manually update it and keep track of everything, which quickly falls by the wayside. When you can’t trust the data you’re looking at, it’s of very little use,” Jeremy explains.
Today, Specialty Building Products is tracking over 8,300 assets across roughly 4,000 users, a scale that would have been nearly impossible to manage accurately with spreadsheets alone.
Without automation, the team had no reliable way to track new device deployments and spent hours each week manually updating and reconciling spreadsheets.
The company’s growth across regions and business units had introduced more devices, more users, and increasingly complex asset lifecycles. As employees came and went, devices changed hands, and locations shifted, tracking IT assets became a daily headache.
The challenges: Invisibility and uncertainty
For Jeremy and his team, asset management challenges fell into three main pain points:
No clear visibility
They struggled to know what IT assets employees were using, and where those assets were physically located.
Difficult change tracking
When assets moved between users or locations, records quickly became outdated.
Low confidence in data
Spreadsheets were prone to human error, and reconciling information across multiple files took hours.
This lack of visibility also meant new device deployments could easily go unnoticed, especially without automated syncing across systems.
Choosing AssetSonar: A cloud-based solution built for scale
Jeremy knew they needed more than a digital filing cabinet. They needed a solution that could:
- Consolidate all IT asset data into one cloud-based platform
- Integrate seamlessly with tools already used by the IT team
- Automate asset tracking to reduce manual effort and human error
That’s when Jeremy discovered AssetSonar.
“We were looking for something cloud-based that we didn’t have to host or manage ourselves. We wanted something that came with a strong set of integrations. AssetSonar checked all those boxes, and more,” he expresses.
Integrations that matter: Intune and Meraki
One of the deciding factors for Jeremy was AssetSonar’s ability to integrate with the tools his team was already using, particularly Microsoft Intune and Cisco Meraki.
Jeremy’s team uses Intune to manage mobile devices and user identities. AssetSonar’s integration pulls device and user data directly from Intune, giving them a real-time, unified view of hardware and users across the organization.
“Having the Intune integration is a significant advantage. Because with the size of our company and how many employees we have, the more things that I can automate, the better, the easier it is, but also the more accurate things, the less somebody has to handle any process, the better,” he says.
With Intune auto-syncing with AssetSonar, Jeremy’s team now saves several hours every week while also gaining visibility into device deployments they previously wouldn’t have known about.
This automation eliminates manual tracking efforts and ensures that asset records stay continuously updated without relying on human input.
The integration with Meraki helps ensure network-connected devices remain visible and properly managed, even across geographically dispersed locations.
The results: Confidence and control
Since implementing AssetSonar, Jeremy’s team has experienced significant improvements in IT asset management:
Complete visibility into assets and users
They can now see what equipment employees have, where assets are located, and who’s responsible for them. This improved visibility has also helped recover older hardware that wasn’t returned when users were upgraded, allowing the team to repurpose devices and avoid ~$5,000 in monthly equipment spend.
Faster offboarding
When employees leave, Jeremy’s team knows exactly which devices to collect, reducing security risks and hardware losses. Offboarding processes are now approximately 75% faster because the team no longer has to determine which equipment each user had.
Reliable data, without manual reconciliation
No more searching through multiple spreadsheets or second-guessing the asset register. As a result, the team has seen a huge increase in confidence in their asset data, enabling faster decisions and more reliable operations.
“The biggest difference is the confidence; we finally know what we have and where it is. It’s saved us a significant amount of time and helped us avoid unnecessary purchases.”
Support that feels like a partner
Alongside the technology benefits, Jeremy highlights the strong support his team has received from AssetSonar:
“The team has been great and very responsive. We’ve never felt like we were on an island. Support has made a big difference.”
For a fast-growing company managing assets across multiple brands and regions, knowing help is always available has added an extra layer of confidence to Specialty Building Products’ digital transformation.
Looking ahead: Integrations and innovation
Jeremy’s team isn’t stopping there. They’re already exploring new ways to get even more value out of AssetSonar, including:
- Integration with the company’s lease management system: To connect asset tracking directly to equipment lease contracts, providing a seamless lifecycle view from acquisition to retirement.
- User experience enhancements: Jeremy also requested a dark mode feature in AssetSonar, a simple change that would make daily use even more comfortable for IT staff working long hours.
The bottom line
For Specialty Building Products, transitioning from spreadsheets to AssetSonar has delivered more than just convenience; it has delivered confidence.
With AssetSonar, Jeremy and his team are transforming IT asset management from an ongoing challenge into a streamlined, strategic advantage.
On asking what advice he would like to give another IT manager looking to modernize asset tracking, Jeremy’s response was,
“The first thing I’d say is, get off the spreadsheets. They’re just too hard to manage, especially when your operations span multiple locations. It’s one thing if you’re handling a single site and can communicate with everyone directly, but once you rely on teams at other sites, spreadsheets quickly become impossible to maintain accurately. You need a proper system, and you need to automate as much as possible. At the end of the day, you have to be able to trust the information you have and you simply can’t do that with manual processes that depend on people constantly updating files. I can’t imagine going back to that; it would be a nightmare.”
