Local types of assets (Assets and Consumables) - managing the Hardware Models

[janglabas1]

Hi All,

I'm facing the following scenario:

we have assets (laptops) and consumables (keyboards) that are ordered based on approved models (multiple models of laptops, keyboards and keyboard+mouse combos).

In most countries we have the same keyboards layout, however some countries (i.e. Germany) have different keyboard layout on both - laptops as well as external keyboards. We have more than 20 laptop models + number of consumable models in place. We don't have hardware model normalization module enabled. 

I need to ensure that:

1. We use/order only approved models (both consumables and hardware assets)

2. The keyboards are matching the local requirements (hardware is ordered globally)

I've tried to search on a web what's the standard way to handle such situation - are we able to break down the model into some sort 'sub-models' or do we need to create a separate model for each country (which would make it unmanageable as we would have hundreds models to manage).. or is there any other solution that would work?

Any suggestions?

Kind regards,

Jan

[Ed Laar]

Hi Jan,

I recognize your use case where you have to deal with country specific models because keyboards or other elements are different or better country specific.

I always look to the way the manufacturers of the involved items deal with this and in most of the cases at the end they are using specific models or more generic models with a specifc option what is in fact also a specic model.

I am very afraid that there is no other way than to follow this method as it also aligns with the models as defined by the manufacturers and so aligns to the models used in procurement.

A suggestion can be in order to simplify the Asset Request for users is to make only the basic model requestable (ie a lenovo model xyz laptop) and in the fulfillment process choose and deliver the right country specic laptop model xyz.

In daily practice: The Asset Request will be send to the involved country where only country specifc laptops are available.

For global procurement purposes: They have to deal with all these specic models.

Last but not least an other point of attention: Remember that each Asset is registered in the AMDB and CMDB. You want to know the country specific characteristics or not? Perhaps (thinking out loud) you can add a couple of fields that can contain the type of keyboard (ASCII or ....). In that case you can have one Model and the ' type of keyboard'  field indicates the keyboard.

Hope this helps. Looking forward to know your idea's and final solution.

Cheers,

Ed

[Fred Jean]

Hello, this is interesting matter and it seems ServiceNow is not well tailored for that even though it does look like a basic requirement.

We have the case were all laptops (Dell) are ordered from the same vendor (Dell) and the purchase order (outside ServiceNow) can specify the wanted keyboard. The Dell models have the same model numbers whatever the keyboard layout.

Requirements I guess one would have around that :

• When a users request a laptop he can select the wanted keyboard laptop, then agents should be able to use the sourcing feature to either
  • create a purchase order indicated the wanted model and the keyboard layout
  • or create a transfer order allowing to select the relevant asset matching the wanted keyboard
• When looking at assets or trying to select an asset on a form, I should be able to select the right asset with the right keyboard (that probably means having the keyboard indication on the asset display name)
• And regarding stock rules I guess it would also be wanted to specify threshold per model and keyboard

And even with the paid HAM plugin, there seem to be no support for that.

Then having end-to-end integration between service request using the sourcing feature seems impossible as Procurement or Transfer orders rely on selecting just a model with no way to specify options (on the sourcing GUI).

So for this kind of need one could think it would be better to have one model record per keyboard, even if they have the same model number, but that would not work with Normalization nor with Discovery.

How do people deal with that ? (Without doing too much custom dev such as customization the sourcing UI page and related scripts)

I posted an Idea related to that matter but I'd be happy to hear about existing solutions : https://support.servicenow.com/now?id=view_idea&sysparm_idea_id=19d6721647cc0a50b6a52545d36d43ee&sys...

Regards,

[Fred Jean]

As usual the orginal idea I posted was closed without even being reviewed. So I posted this new one : https://support.servicenow.com/ideas?id=view_idea&sysparm_idea_id=57410ed583371a50cdbbc430feaad315&s...

[Premankit]

You can try playing with published catalog availability. You can publish two models but make them available based on country the model work. I think available for and not available for are not by default displayed, you will need to add them. 

let me know if that didn't help.