Asset Tracking with Help Desk Software

Software Asset Management (SAM) is an important consideration for any IT department. SAM is used to keep tabs on the organization?s licensing position. Asset details can also be recorded for hardware in a help desk system. In fact, you can expand the tracking forms to monitor almost anything your company buys.

Here are a few key reasons why you?d want to track this kind of data in a help desk system.

Monitoring warranties in your help desk system
If you own a couple of computers yourself, you probably don?t remember exactly when you purchased them, and you?re even less likely to remember the details of the warranty that came with them. In a busy IT department, it can be difficult to keep track of paperwork for valuable items like laptops and desktops, and this can mean repairs are more costly.

Asset management allows you to record warranty details for everything you buy. Once recorded, you can sort and filter the data according to your needs, ensuring you never pay for a repair which should have been covered.

Customizing tracking fields with asset management
There?s no need to use the same rigid layout to record everything. The details you hold for a laptop will undoubtedly be more complex than they would be for a smartphone or a software application. For example, software asset recording may require that you upload a scanned copy of the license agreement from a boxed product.

A good help desk system will allow you to create asset types and record different metrics for each type of asset. This makes reports more meaningful, and it makes the data much easier to manage.

Spotting trends using your help desk system
If you record asset data, you can link this with your Incidents, Requests and Problems. This benefits the team in a couple of ways. It makes data entry speedier, of course, but it also means you can pull data back out of the help desk system to create reports based on asset metrics.

If you notice a particular type of laptop tends to develop problems after a while, you can use your asset data to locate and test other similar laptops before those problems occur. Assuming you?ve recorded the warranty information, you can send them off for repair in good time. You could choose to create custom reports based on one or two brands of laptop to see if the problem is typical. This kind of tracking is extremely powerful and can save you a lot of time.

Tracking equipment loan requests
If you have pool equipment, such as tablet computers or smartphones, use asset management to track the whereabouts of each machine. Once a Request for that item is logged, your team will always know exactly where that machine is at any given time. If you?ve tracked metrics about that asset in the past, you could choose not to loan it out if it has the potential to fail.