Asset and inventory management is critical in any organization. It is about capturing the basics; knowing what devices you own and who owns them. By maintaining accurate, up-to-date inventory of owned hardware and software, businesses can easily access overviews of their assets. In doing so, this allows companies to ensure their tangible and intangible assets are maintained, accounted for and maximized to their full potential.
1.Tracking Investment through Hardware & Software Management Discovery, Data Capture and Storage
It is important for a business to know where their money is going. An asset inventory will allow an organization to reduce the cost of hardware by tracking the lifecycle of each device and ensuring they are being used up to their end of life. Hardware management also ensures that the business complies with any sort of hardware leasing, for example, by tracking date and time.
While hardware is a physical asset, software is a digital asset that also needs to be tracked. An asset inventory has the ability to track licencing, ensuring they do not surpass the amount of uses per licence, which can result in breaching the vendor agreement. Furthermore, an organization can forecast a purchase of a new version of software based on the existing licences used.
2.Increasing Efficiency and Profitability
Asset and inventory management allows one to combine multiple business processes such as financial, contractual, maintenance and inventory functions in order to support the lifecycle and strategic decision making for IT. Departments that once ran independently of each other are now able to collaborate in decision-making processes, making a company more efficient and profitable.
3.Automating Asset Discovery & Tracking
A lot of businesses have some sort of BYOD policy set in place. But how do you know where these devices are connecting and if they are accessing an unauthorized area? Some asset management tools have asset discovery agents that constantly scan the network for any new devices. This is critical to ensure all BYOD devices stay in the designated zones because they are not provisioned by the company and they could have their own vulnerabilities. Asset Discovery tools also help with the detection of any sort of malicious or non-malicious rogue devices on the network that could pose a threat to the infrastructure.
4.Tracking Tickets
Another benefit to asset and inventory management is the ability to track and trend any sort of incident or outage. Users are able to log a ticket against the asset in order to document issues. It is important that IT management review these tickets in order to assess the current state of the infrastructure, provide metrics, insights and to evaluate future purchases. These tickets can also provide metrics that can also be used to trend a root cause issue that may be affecting multiple devices.
5.Generating Reports
These tools have the capacity to review the existing tickets and generate reports for IT and stakeholders.
IT and stakeholders are able to review these reports, in order to generate year to date TCM (Total Cost of Maintenance) and BM% (Breakdown Maintenance Percentage), which allows organizations to review the effectiveness and efficiencies of their IT programs and give them ability to forecast future expenses.
Businesses can benefit greatly with asset and inventory management. These tools provide businesses with information needed to make informed decisions that can result in increased accountability and profitability.
