Hardware Asset Management in the Work-from-home Environment
Hardware asset management is often the task companies know needs to be done but never makes it to front runner in objectives. Software is usually the major focus, but this year things have changed. The pandemic has forced companies to address their hardware asset management with an urgency never felt before.
Hardware Asset Management has problems
Before the pandemic, companies were already faced with serious challenges in getting an asset management system in place. These pre-existing conditions included:
- Not knowing what they had and working with bad data
- Tracking and managing done manually, with bad processes and human error
- Complex legacy systems with no team alignment or executive support to update
- Failed audits, security issues, and theft
Add in a pandemic and these issues have become a top priority and even though they haven’t been solved, companies are now also trying to figure out:
- What did employees take home?
- What’s depreciating in storage?
- What should be returned, replaced or retired?
- Where is all the other stuff?
This results in increases in costs, employee workload, and overall frustration and a decrease in the ability to be in control. People are desperate for a solution and conversations are happening around tightening governance and process and adding checks and balances. This “doubling down” is a common reaction to a crisis, along with hoping it will simply go away, but this isn’t a holistic solution that is going to last. And the pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon.
There’s only one solution to improve and transform IT to be more capable:
Companies need to embrace a digital transformation.
The pandemic has brought an opportunity to build a digital solution for the future that gets people out of the complexity of hardware asset management. This means aligning service and technology and thinking more about the customer experience. Moving forward, everything will be measured differently because employees are at home. Their satisfaction level with their IT department will be how easy it is for them to get the hardware and assets they need delivered to them. Companies need to re-think operations and the value they’re looking to get out of their IT and digital systems.
AMI has made this possible with AssetTrack® for ServiceNow.
AssetTrack® isn’t just software to track assets; it’s a total solution for erasing asset management headaches. With AssetTrack® companies get an automated solution, customized to their specific needs that puts them in control. AssetTrack® logs, tracks, secures, analyzes, and reports on data throughout the hardware lifecycle. Information is easily accessible and most of all, accurate.
AMI President and CEO, Tom Watson says, “We are a technology solution to the hardware asset management problem, but customers don’t want the technology, they need a solution to the problem.”
Hardware Asset Management Service Providers
That’s where managed service providers Re-Source Partners comes in. Re-Source Partners is the answer to aligning service and technology and embracing a digital solution. Their team of MSP’s will customize and deploy a solution using AssetTrack® allowing companies to focus on their core business, not their asset inventory.
The pandemic is driving change and opportunity for companies to be able to free up their time and what they do with this added time could be monumental. They can relieve staff of manual tasks that aren’t their core competencies, improve metrics, simplify their systems and let their employees get back to doing what they do best. Hint: it’s not tracking and managing their assets.