"Missing" state vs. "Retired" states

[Paulo Andrielli]

Hi HAM Community,

I would like to understand how other ServiceNow HAM customers manage assets that are considered "Missing", particularly when the asset is not expected to be recovered.

In our company, we have historically used Missing as the asset State. Once an asset is moved to Missing, it can remain in that state indefinitely.

From a lifecycle perspective, however, our understanding is that these assets should eventually reach Retired, since Retired represents the final lifecycle state of the asset. One possible approach would therefore be to use Missing as a Substate of Retired, rather than keeping Missing as the final State.

Our situation is slightly different because financial asset retirement is managed in a separate financial system. Missing assets are retired there, so keeping them as Missing in ServiceNow does not currently create a reconciliation or audit issue for us.

I would be interested to know how other HAM customers handle this:

• Do you move missing assets to Retired, with Missing as a Substate or retirement reason?
• Do you keep Missing as the final State in ServiceNow, potentially indefinitely?
• If you use Missing as a final State, have you experienced any lifecycle, reporting, compliance, audit, or HAM process issues because of it?
• Do you apply any waiting period or process before moving a Missing asset to Retired?

I am particularly interested in understanding the most common practice across ServiceNow HAM implementations and the reasoning behind it.

Thanks a lot for any input on that!