EZOfficeInventory is now EZO. Discover the reasons behind the rebrand and what it entails 
As an equipment manager in a warehouse, one of your biggest asset management challenges is setting up a process for staff to log requests for inventory. Right now, you may be juggling between asset requests coming in from emails, personal texts, or even verbal ‘taps on the shoulder’. It can take hours to recall and then jot down every request and track it in a spreadsheet. Even then, there is no guarantee that your staff got what they were looking for.
What if there was an all-purpose employee portal designed to manage and track ‘universal’ asset and inventory requests. As the equipment manager, you can control the information provided to staff on the field by ensuring every request is recorded in real time.
Sounds brilliant, right? Let’s get into more detail.
What is an employee portal for asset requests?
If you regularly deal with fulfilling asset requests for resource-intensive professionals like field workers, students, or health technicians, etc., an employee portal is your one-stop equipment shop for providing quick and easy access to these folks.
It acts as a centralized platform that houses all types of asset requests coming in, eliminating manual back-and-forth and reducing your workload for fulfilling asset requests.
It’s better if the portal does not require employees to create additional log-ins, therefore simplifying the process of submitting equipment requests. Once logged in, employees can simply search for the equipment they need, place a request, and track the status of their request until completion.
Benefits of employee portal for admins and staff
It’s hard being an equipment manager when requests come in from all kinds of bizarre forms, clunky approval processes take forever, and everyone’s always asking you for updates.
Setting up an employee portal for asset requests that caters to the needs of different employees, automates approval processes, and provides updates to employees on the request status can make your life simpler.
Let’s discuss the benefits of an employee portal in detail!
1. Centralized request submissions
If you deal with manual request submissions, there’s a lot of scattered data. Requests can come in from multiple sources such as emails, texts, calls, or office drop-ins.
With an equipment portal for employees, you can create a central platform where employees can submit all sorts of asset requests. Having a single source for request submission can save time and effort for both managers and the staff. It compiles all critical information in one place so it’s easy to verify and approve requests.
2. Real-time insights into equipment availability
When it comes to fulfilling equipment requests, a big challenge for equipment managers is dealing with out-of-stock items. This problem mainly exists because oftentimes employees are simply not aware of what’s available and what’s not.
The employee portal can resolve this issue by offering a real-time, bird’s eye view of the available count of all kinds of assets displayed on the portal. Staff can easily apply a filter to view only available items and submit their requests accordingly.
3. Keeping employees informed on request status
The self-serve platform can empower equipment requesters to handle all their asset needs on their own, instead of having to track down asset managers and wait in long queues.
As soon as a request is made, the users can easily view the status in the portal and track it down to completion. Any comments or feedback added to r the requests can also be sent as email notifications to employees, providing full visibility into the whole process.
4. Quick turnaround time
With a manual process of fulfilling asset requests, it can take up to weeks to finally get the required asset delivered to the right users.
However, the equipment portal can cut the turnaround time to minutes. This is possible because employees place requests for only the available items, reducing consistent back and forth.
Once a request is placed, the portal sends an immediate alert to equipment managers so they can take immediate action. The whole process is swift enough to improve your SLAs.
5. Clear audit trail for visibility
With a large number of employees requesting different types of items, it can get tricky to track what’s going where. As one of the benefits of the employee portal, equipment managers can use it to maintain a trail of ownership as assets are checked out.
You can log in at any time and clearly view which assets are assigned to whom. This can help maintain transparency through asset auditing and limit item loss. The digital record creates a clear line of accountability, making folks more mindful of the items in their care. It’s not just an anonymous checkout; it’s tied to the profile of your employees.
6. Instant email notifications
Most of the equipment managers working with a manual request system need to search for the email threads where employees requested for equipment, reply to them, and keep tabs on them until the equipment is returned. Not anymore!
The equipment portal does it all for you. As soon as the request is made, you as the approver get notified on the portal. The requester also receives alerts for any type of action taken on their request – maintaining a trail of action history right on the portal where it’s easy to access.
7. Automated approvals
It is quite common for each department to have a different approver to cater to their equipment requests. This hierarchy can be easily set up in the equipment portal for seamless and quick approvals without any lags.
Equipment managers can set up permissions to automatically route requests from certain employees to approvers from specific departments for faster turnaround times.
Tips to set up a customizable employee portal for simplifying asset requests
The employee portal is an intuitive platform to place equipment requests and track them in real time.
Below, we detail some steps you can follow to enable a swift request fulfillment process:
1. Customize it for your company’s brands and themes
You can design your own portal. Choose the brand theme, colors, and dropdown names. Set up what requestors can see and what actions they can perform, and add any external links as required.
Tailor both the look and feel as well as the functionality of the portal to your organizational needs, much like an easy-to-use website builder.
2. Multiple log-in options for ease of use
A major issue for warehouse system admins is handling non-tech-savvy users with shared accounts that compromise accountability. To deal with this problem, you can design the equipment portal to be very user-friendly and even enable non-login users.
This means that users don’t even need to log in to place a request. You can make the portal public for easy access across all departments or locations. Once in, non-logged in users can navigate through the site to browse and place reservations for required assets.
3. Create a flexible requesting process
The log-in process is simple and takes just a few clicks. As one of the benefits of the employee portal, you can design the interface to be intuitive – guiding users through the app to proceed and find the assets they need.
While making a reservation, users can edit fields like booking windows, add notes, and cancel the request anytime. This saves you the inconvenience of reserved items being unavailable for others. Additionally, with the option to include notes, you can easily accommodate any specific requirements tied to the request.
4. Enable easy communication
How common is it for employees to keep on waiting ages to receive the asset they requested? Pretty common, right? Well, it doesn’t have to be. Set your employee portal for asset requests such that it enables real-time communication through open comment threads under each request made.
This can help employees to add revisions or ask questions regarding the reservations and get them answered right away. Feeling heard and informed makes a huge difference. It shows you value their time and need to get things done.
5. Take feedback for improved employee experience
It’s important to gauge and improve the user journey when it comes to the fulfilment process. You can set up feedback forms or link surveys to collect feedback from employees right and evaluate their request experience.
Addressing any roadblocks or lags right away can highlight any snags or frustrations in the process. Maybe the request form is confusing, approval takes too long, or the asset handover is clunky. You’ll see the patterns in the feedback– another one of the benefits of employee portal.
6. SLA compliance for faster response
You can ensure that requests are catered to within a specified time interval for smooth operations at all times. Set SLA compliance alerts to highlight which requests are taking longer to resolve. These flagged requests can then be investigated to avoid further delays.
Different types of asset requests you can manage using the employee portal
The employee portal can be designed to accommodate multiple types of requests from users – adding to the countless benefits of the employee portal. Some of the common types of asset requests are discussed below:
1. Asset kits for newly hired employees
Ella, a new marketing team member, has joined the company. She is provided with a link to the employee portal to initiate a request for all the assets she requires to complete her onboarding.
For instance, she needs a space grey colored Macbook with 24 GB of memory. Once logged in to the portal, she can apply filters to sort out laptops that match her specifications. For easy delivery, she can specify the delivery date and office location.
2. Chromebooks checkout at a New York campus
The employee portal can be used to manage item distribution across different locations. Let’s say you are the university administrator and need to manage all checkouts from across different campuses. You create a link on the portal that only shows available items at a specific campus, such as the New York campus.
Students can simply access this link and check out Chromebooks here – making the process straightforward. Admins can prevent requests for irrelevant items by implementing location-based segregation.
3. Request to resolve printer malfunction
Apart from asset requests, the portal can also host general requests. These requests cater to miscellaneous issues related to assets on the portal. As the majority of the employees have access to this portal for their asset needs, they can also use this to log general requests.
For instance, a user needs to log in to a printer breakdown. They simply need to go to the general request form, enter all the details, and submit it. The user can track this in real-time and leave comments and updates if needed.
Top 3 industry use cases for the employee portal
The benefits of employee portal are widely known across industries. It is mainly used by a large number of staff and users out in the field. It acts as a great fit for equipment or asset managers who want to exercise control over the visibility of items to field workers or gauge the demand of assets right from the project site.
Here are the top 3 industry use cases for the employee portal:
IBEX : Construction/Site services
The common workflows of a site services company IBEX include giving out tools like jackhammers, generators, or scaffolding sections at multiple sites. The admin at the company wants to limit stock visibility to the staff.
As the staff is mostly out in the field, information on stock quantities and locations is irrelevant for them. The solution? The employee portal for asset requests.
The IT admin redirects all the staff users to the employee portal. Staff users access the portal quickly and easily with no additional log-in required.
Even when the asset quantity isn’t available, admins allow requests to come in to track and fulfill item demand at the warehouse. In this way, the company benefits from super fast request management and demand tracking.
Covenance High School : Education/Media LabsÂ
In the education industry, you have IT equipment like chromebooks, laptops, or tablets,etc exchanging multiple hands over time. Such workflows can be closely monitored with the help of the equipment scheduling portal.
Let’s see how Covenance High School can use the portal to facilitate asset hand-offs for teachers, staff, and students.
- Provisioning and SSO: The school can enable SSO for all the students and teachers for one-step logins to request items.
- Reminders and Alerts: Anyone who has checked out an item due for return can be sent a reminder to avoid delays and conflicts with future reservations.
- Minimum log-in time: The school admin can set up automated logouts after a request has been completed to prevent unauthorized access and security risks.
New Providence Clinic : Clinics and Labs
A healthcare clinic can deploy the equipment scheduling portal to make patient handling easier and more streamlined for medical practitioners. Here is how:
- Designated equipment menu cards: The equipment coordinator can populate specific links with equipment related to the different branches of patient care available at the clinic. These commonly include primary care, specialized consultations, and diagnostic testing.
- Critical maintenance: Healthcare staff can report any urgent maintenance issues in the general request form at the portal to expedite operations without unprecedented delays.
- Procurement request: Medical practitioners on-site can use custom forms on the portal homepage to add any requests for procuring new or upgraded medical equipment.
Carry out swift request handling with asset management and equipment scheduling in EZO
For smooth request handling, opt for a tool that offers equipment scheduling along with asset management, whilst offering high customizability and enabling greater control to you as admins.
EZO’s asset management solution offers a fulfillment center for equipment managers with a request management portal designed so your employees can submit assets or any kinds of general requests.
Create a smooth reservation channel for requesters and opt for quick approval actions with EZO’s asset management software.
