Asset Life Cycle through Purchase Order and Barcode

ServiceDesk Plus brings you extensive asset management capabilities to track and manage assets throughout their life cycle; from procurement to disposal.  

 

You can easily add assets, check their availability or states at any given time, book assets, sync CIs as assets, and assign and track ownership or loans. Using ServiceDesk Plus to manage assets helps in ensuring optimal usage of your assets and resources.

 

Assets can be procured in various ways; you could purchase them by raising a purchase order (PO) or by adding already existing assets. These assets can also be scanned through Barcode or Service Tags. This asset information needs to be managed in a systematic manner so that assets are distributed/assigned to the right users, their states are properly tracked, and they are safely disposed off when they expire.

 

The following schema captures the Asset Management workflow that ServiceDesk Plus follows to ensure efficient end-to-end Asset Management out of the box:

 

 

Configurations

Using ServiceDesk Plus, organizations can purchase assets or register their inventory into ServiceDesk Plus following these steps.

 

Step 1: Procure assets. You can either raise a service request, or create a PO or a purchase request.

Alternatively, if the PO is handled separately,  you can scan and add those assets into ServiceDesk Plus. The IT or Asset Management department can add assets using barcode. Know more about barcode techniques.

 

 

Step 2: Receive assets and add service tags as shown below. Now the workstations and servers are added to the Assets module.

 

 

Step 3: Deploy the Endpoint Central agent to the assets. This allows you to scan assets and fetch inventory data.

• During the scan, Endpoint Central pushes the inventory data, along with service tag and last logged-in user details, to ServiceDesk Plus.

• After the scan, the asset added via PO will be updated with the scanned data from Endpoint Central.

 

Step 4: Assign asset owners. Technicians with Add Assets permission can perform this action based on the last login information. This will update the asset from In Store status to In Use. You can then map the department and update the relationship into CMDB.

These assets can later move to different states such as In Repair, Expired, or Disposed. Know more.

 

Step 5: Manage the inventoried assets by following these methods:

• Configure an asset loan when users request a spare laptop, mouse, mobile phone, tablet, or other assets. Using the asset loan, you can track loan owners and purpose of loan for In Use assets under Asset Loan. Know more.

• Asset Replenishment helps organizations track asset count and ensure that the organization does not run out of assets. Know more.

 

Step 6: Update damaged assets to In Repair or any custom asset state. You can also track these assets under the Associations tab from other modules such as Requests, Problems, Changes, or Contracts.

 

Step 7: Mark assets that are no longer active as Expired or Disposed assets. Then, you can release associated asset licenses and reuse them for the new assets.

ServiceDesk Plus allows you to dispose or delete an asset if it's not scanned for N number of days. You can define this rule under Admin > Discovery > Scan Settings.

 

 

You can also configure rules in Endpoint Central to delete assets when they are removed from the Active Directory.

 

 

From ServiceDesk Plus settings in Endpoint Central, you can define the following action to optimize asset management effectively.