Consumable Asset Tracking Best Practices

Amber Kearn
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

‎09-18-2023 02:23 PM

Hello. I have a customer asking for insight on best practices and industry standards related to consumables. They do not track serial #'s for what they consider consumables. Could you please provide answers to the below? Thank you

  1. What’s considered a consumable? 
    1. Mouse
    2. Keyboard
    3. Headset
    4. Monitor
    5. Anything else?

How do most companies track these?

    1. Inventory management only
    2. Barcode / serial # tracking?
  1. Is tracking by serial number common?
    1. If so, what’s the value of doing vs not doing?
  2. Any links to industry standard practice(s) related to consumables would be helpful.

 

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2 REPLIES 2

Ashok Sasidhara
Tera Sage
Tera Sage

‎09-18-2023 09:08 PM

Consumables are usually inexpensive, purchased in bulk and distributed when requested. Apart from the devices which you mentioned, other common examples of consumables are printer toners, laptop chargers, USB cables, batteries etc.

 

The primary goal for managing consumables is storing cost and financial information for purposes like expenditure tracking and chargebacks. So it is sufficient to only manage inventory to track quantities available for each model and their costs. As they are managed in bulk, serial number is not tracked. If the device is important enough to track individually with serial number, it should be managed as a hardware asset instead of a consumable.

 

Following are some best practices for managing consumables:

1. They are managed in bulk with very few attributes like the location, stockroom, model, cost, state, substate etc. captured. In ServiceNow, all consumables use the same model category (consumable).

2. The key factors to be considered while deciding whether a device needs to be tracked as a consumable are i) Value (usually low cost items) and ii) Shelf life - they are consumed or expired after use unlike assets (e.g. printer toner).

3. Consumable items which the users require frequently should be published in the catalog item for ordering. 

4. The stock availability should be tracked more proactively for certain consumables to make sure that they are always available (E.g. Running out of printer toner would be a risk in organizations which use physical documents often). 

DavidWallace1
Mega Guru

‎09-19-2023 07:04 AM

Agree with everything Ashok has written, but my take..

  1. What’s considered a consumable? 
    1. Mouse - usually
    2. Keyboard - usually
    3. Headset - yes
    4. Monitor - sometimes depending on value
    5. Anything else? - adapters, cables, batteries

How do most companies track these? - well if they define them to be consumables, then by definition they aren't tracking them by serial number - the tool won't allow it. If you have a need to track the serial number of something then you aren't thinking of it as a consumable. In my mind, it's a consumable if, once you have sent something out to a user, you do not expect (or want) to get it back. Which is obvious for things like ink or toner cartridges, a little less so for things like headsets or keyboards.

 

If you have no intention of reusing something should it come back (or if there are other concerns about how you process them if they were returned e.g. hygiene, data (think USB drives)) then it is often a good candidate to be a consumable.

 

Conversely if you want to be sure that something is going to get correctly disposed of then maybe some of these things could be deliberately NOT be consumables, just to make sure you get them back when they are done with so that you can follow the correct process to dispose of them (again USB drives or anything with data).

 

  1. Is tracking by serial number common?
    1. If so, what’s the value of doing vs not doing?

If you're tracking by serial number, then it shouldn't be a consumable (see above). If you mean for hardware models, yes totally the norm. If it has a Configuration Item it should almost definitely have a serial number tracked asset. It's the ones which don't have a CI (like monitors, desktop printers, keyboards etc) where it is down to preference whether it is a consumable or a hardware model tracked by serial number.

 

The value of tracking by serial number comes from

  • being able to get the specific item back from a specific user at some point in the future
  • potentially being able to re-use assets once the current user has finished with it
  • being able to have a warranty or maintenance contract related to that specific piece of hardware
  • tracking depreciation for high value items
  • potentially knowing (through discovery particularly for computers) which assets are actually getting used

One other thing to remember though, is that even though models can be created in different model tables, you can force them to behave as consumables. For example you can define a model in the hardware model table and make it work like a consumable by setting the category as consumable and the Asset Tracking Strategy to be consumable - sort of like a hybrid approach.

DavidWallace1_0-1695131288360.png

 

I have this scenario where one customer wants to track monitors and printers by serial number (particularly the high end expensive ones), but another wants them to be consumables (because they are relatively low value models). The tool does allow you to create both scenarios.