The Need for IT Asset Tracking Software
Every company understands how critical the impact of asset management can be on their bottom line. With organizations seeking to improve their operational efficiency and asset utilization while reducing costs, they have increased their use of efficient tools preferably an IT asset tracking software. It helps them increase flexibility, improve productivity and achieve better ROI. It provides them complete visibility of their assets in real time, enabling them to improve asset utilization and employee productivity. This blog will detail how you can achieve asset visibility using an IT asset tracking software.
An IT asset tracking software enables organizations to manage their physical and digital assets (including hardware and software inventories) efficiently. It helps them to ensure that all the assets and equipment are operating at an optimum level within the organization. A robust solution has the capability to detect equipment downtime, expired licenses, asset misplacement, and incomplete asset assignments ensuring there are no last minute unavailability or breakdown issues.
Benefits of implementing an effective IT Asset tracking software
All businesses have a collection of assets that they need to maintain. With the right asset tracking solution in place, you can gain more detailed control over your assets and a higher return on your investment.
Read More: Benefits of IT Asset Management Software
What does Asset Visibility refer to?
How to increase Asset Visibility?
You can’t manage what you can’t measure and you can’t measure what you can’t see. When selecting a tool for your IT asset management, confirm it can gather the data you need to measure the performance of your processes. This is the best way to ensure you have accurate information when making strategic decisions including what to acquire and what to dispose of.
A tool must enable you to look into all your assets and inventories in real-time, know what it is and where it is located, who has the possession of what item or digital asset, what’s the condition of the item, where you bought it and how much do you have in stock, when is an item available to use, all that and a complete history of all assets. All this and more helps an organization achieve complete asset visibility.
Read More: IT Asset Management Best Practices
Ways to Increase Asset Visibility using IT asset tracking software
With the above-mentioned benefits of using IT asset tracking software, an organization can achieve a number of other benefits including fewer errors, reduction in paperwork, reduced total cost of ownership, cost-effective regulatory compliance, and above all automatic identification of all the missing, retired and replaced assets. Following are some of the prominent ways to increase asset visibility in your organization:
– Manage a comprehensive IT Asset Lifecycle History
– Implement serialized asset tracking
– Automate the Process with Barcode/QR code scanning
– Choose easy-to-use tool for members
– Perform regular IT Asset Audits
– Set thresholds on stock quantity
– Keep Centralized Repository System
Asset Lifecycle Management
Like most things in life, IT assets follow a lifecycle: procurement, deployment and discoverability, maintenance and handling, reporting, and lastly retirement and disposal. You need to maintain full visibility and accountability for all assets for their entire lifecycle i.e. from acquisition through retirement or disposal. When you implement an asset tracking solution, the process of managing and monitoring the asset lifecycle becomes easy.
Firstly, plan what types of assets you need to support your business and procure them. For hardware, track assets by their asset tags or serial numbers and bulk associate them to warranty contracts via custom fields or add them to groups. For software or digital assets, create software listing and add common licensing metrics. Other than these two prominent types of assets, you can also track contracts, purchase orders and invoices for financial assets through IT asset tracking solution.
For a comprehensive lifecycle history, you can monitor events like supply chain, maintenance, asset retirement/removal, changes made to an asset detail. Asset lifecycle also includes the data on contracts with vendors that provide you assets, asset availability for usage, location tracking of assets, any activity while the asset was in use or possession. You can always retire an asset that is no longer in use or requiring you unnecessary maintenance costs.
Serialize Asset Tracking
You can carry out effortless asset audits, schedule preventive maintenance events, perform status checks on asset availability, locate items on the go, and stay on top of inventory stock with proper serialized asset tracking. Asset tags can be really useful for businesses wanting to cut down processing times, reduce operational costs, better data accuracy, and schedule maintenance events effortlessly.
By integrating the convenience of asset tags with well thought out features, IT Asset tracking software can take the usage of asset tags to the next level. These tags help you pull up information on items quickly, enabling you to plan out your decisions better and harness the power of serialized asset tracking to improve procurement management. These tags help you improve visibility into asset location, status, its condition, associated components, and parts tracked worldwide. Whether the assets are issued or transferred, you’ll always have an entire history on them from acquisition to disposal.
Automate the Asset Management Process
IT asset tracking solution is part of the modern technology environment today. It can be used to automate the usage of a clipboard or a spreadsheet to perform IT asset management. It is simple, do what courier companies do! Use barcodes and QR codes to update your asset repository in real-time. No more manual inventory checks for companies. With automated discovery functionality baked in these tools, you can search and track assets in a breeze.
Small businesses and large enterprises have always had a hard time designing a system that can manage and track their IT assets. With barcodes and QR codes, you can ensure smooth operational workflow and decreased theft instances within your organization. These can also be used to streamline the cataloging and asset/inventory management. When you scan a barcode, the information on an asset pulls up and you can take needed actions on it. This information gives you a brief asset visibility that can be utilized for better organizational and logistical operations. Handheld scanners can also be integrated with most of the IT asset management solutions and some of them have the ability to work with smartphones as well.
Conduct Asset Audits and Set Stock thresholds
Poor asset management leads to the significant operational expense to a company, not to forget the compliance risk involved. It’s not easy keeping track of all the software licenses for different models and consumption of those licenses. You must have a proper management system that automates tracking of software you’re using or not be using, the license you are paying for or not and risking a penalty. Asset audits enable companies to identify potential ghost assets and licenses. These help in identifying what, where and in what condition of an asset. Perform asset audits regularly and minimize compliance risk. Get involved in boosting asset visibility through asset audits.
What chews off your budget quicker than ghost assets? They are the over or understocked items in your organization. Set stock thresholds for items like ink, toner, keyboards, and other consumables that follow a lifecycle and can be tracked. Create purchase orders and automate the replenishment process whenever inventory levels drop below your specified thresholds. This helps you in getting faster and accurate data that lets you plan better for the future ahead.
Keep a Centralized Repository System
It’s not effective for asset management in any language for a company when it is keeping track of information through spreadsheets. For better IT asset management, it is crucial to agree to have a centralized asset repository as the only source of information access control. This repository helps you track the complete asset lifecycle and monitor all the events in real-time, no matter what the location is or who is accessing it. Hence, the solution is having a cloud-based IT asset tracking software for seamless asset management.
Numerous companies have started shifting from on-premise to cloud applications as they offer a centralized repository, complete asset visibility, mobile accessibility, intuitive services and drag-and-drop functionality. The cloud-based solutions provide low-cost options and speedy deployment of services. Due to the shift from on-premise to cloud solutions, a major share of around 50% was seen in 2015 that belonged to cloud-based solutions. In another survey by Statista, the size of SMB cloud services in 2018 is forecasted to reach 25.2 billion in the United States. One of the major reasons why companies are choosing cloud-based solutions over on-premise systems is security.
Choosing the best IT Asset Tracking Software?
The best solution is the one that saves time, reduces operating costs and increases the asset visibility. It helps organizations gain increased visibility into today’s IT environment and the threats that continually challenge it.
EZOfficeInventory is the leading asset tracking software used by SMBs and technopreneurs all over the globe. Track assets and boost your company assets’ visibility seamlessly.
For more assistance, drop us an email at support@ezo.io.
