HAM pro - Is sourcing engine essential to use?

[shelleybrowner]

I’m a process engineer investigating solutions for a business. Ie not a developer. I have a lot of HAM experience in other tools and we solved for all HAM requirements with basic SN ITSM workflows and transfer orders at my previous company witbout HAM Pro. Thus I’m new to the sourcing engine.

My current perception is that the sourcing engine may not always be appropriate to use in all business cases and also it’s dependent on user location data. 1 issue is there are 200 different models in their estate and the business requires the user or technician to request “a laptop” ie Non model specific. The stockroom that issues out the laptop to the technician to build is what ever model is oldest still under warranty for utilization of second hand equipment etc. There are a myriad of operation issues being caused by the sourcing engine OOTB function and I realize there are probably fixes and work around for everything but all the ones I’ve looked at result in a ripple effect new issue that then needs to be solved for. Thus I’m asking is it really 100% necessary to used the sourcing engine for a user/technician to make a request on the catalogue to initiate a deployment process. Or can one solve for a user request through to deployment without the sourcing engine. 
ie the question is not how to make the sourcing engine work (there are lots and lots and lots of reasons why it’s causing a huge headache at the moment) (eg user location data, 100s models that will need to be published and the requestor needs to know what model to submit, pre-reservation of logical records causing problems when physical asset picked up and attempted to link to process A, is already linked to process B as a pre-reserved asset.) Don’t want to get into the detail too much, but lots of headaches trying to use it OOTB)

My question is… can we build a solution without the sourcing engine for initial benefit of asset management and then perhaps implement the sourcing engine later when things like user location data (which drives the assignment rules) are fixed in the future. 
Is it 100% necessary to use the sourcing engine in HAM pro or is it possible to utilize the other deployment workflows if we don’t use the sourcing engine?