Controlling assets with stockrooms and stock rules

[Suzanne Smith]

"I live in New York, but I'm gone 310, 320 days a year. My apartment is storage."

-Christian Scott, jazz trumpeter

Where do you store your stuff? If you are using the ServiceNow Asset Management application, consider using the stockroom functionality to manage asset storage.

In ServiceNow, there are six types of stockrooms:

• On-site: a stockroom at a customer location
• Field agent: a virtual stockroom associated with an individual agent (for example, a field agent's car)
• FSL: a forward shipping location, usually a small stockroom
• PUDO: a pick up/drop off location such as a postal box
• Stockroom: a common stockroom
• Central stockroom: a larger stockroom that may supply other stockrooms and FSLs

Each of these stockroom types has a priority. For example, an on-site stockroom has a higher priority than a central stockroom because it would generally be cheaper and faster to obtain an asset from an on-site stockroom. You can create new stockroom types at any time to suit your organization's needs. Be sure to assign an appropriate priority to any stockrooms you create.

When assets are delivered to a stockroom, they are received and checked against a purchase order. Assets can stay in the stockroom where they were delivered or transferred to another stockroom using a transfer order.

For more efficient management of assets, use stock rules for restocking items. A stock rule analyzes inventory thresholds and orders or transfers items appropriately. Stock rules can generate a transfer order or send an email message to a stockroom manager notifying them that the threshold was reached (so the manager can place an order). For example, when a specific laptop model reaches an inventory of 25 in an individual stockroom, put a stock rule in place that automatically creates a transfer order to move 25 more over from another stockroom.

When creating stock rules, think carefully about the thresholds and order size you set. Those two fields control the fine tuning of stock rules. Change those fields as necessary to get them right. For detailed information, see Using Stock Rules to Control Inventory in the ServiceNow product documentation.

ServiceNow offers more information about stockrooms and stock rules.

In the product documentation:

Stockrooms and Stock Rules

Receiving Assets

Transfer Orders

In the community:

Asset Management - Stockrules Task

Hardware Asset - State & Substate

Personal stockroom error

Stockroom sourcing issue

[eferringtonFP]

Add a 7th Type.   Vendor/Re-seller Stock (Warehouse)

Big need for organization who need to manage will supply chain of a refresh process and has limited storage ability internally to the org.   They then can commission the Reseller/Vendor to warehouse.   In these scenarios, visibility to that stock is needed.

[Suzanne Smith]

Great idea, Eric. I logged an enhancement request for your idea. The asset management product manager and dev team can review the request for inclusion in a future release. For now, you could certainly manually create a Vendor/Re-seller warehouse stockroom type to use.

[eferringtonFP]

Correct, this was more of a comment of how I've utilized the tool to create this solution for several large service-now customers. 🙂

[gyedwab]

Great summary! Once you're starting to tracking assets to their stock room, it gets easier to visualize where your inventory sits:

https://my.exploreanalytics.com/pub/view/844aa195a6df4d74ae77fdbea89775a8

[usuglatwala]

Hello All,

Once the asset is assigned from the stockroom, can it be traced back to its Stockroom? Also, can I generate a report based on a specific month to see which assets were stocked in a particular stockroom in that month?

Thanks

[Suzanne Smith]

Hi Usman,

I'll get an answer for you. Stay tuned 🙂

Suzanne

[eferringtonFP]

You'll have to turn on Metrics on your asset for for the stockroom field.

[Suzanne Smith]

Hi Usman,

I talked to a fabulous developer, Jose, here at ServiceNow and he gave me some info that I think will be helpful to you.

The simple answer to your question is no, we do not track the location of an asset through stockrooms in the base system (out-of-box). That said, you do have a couple of options:

1. Turn on auditing for the asset table. This enables you to see the history of the asset table, including when the stockroom was changed and from what. The drawback to this approach is that every field is audited, which may impact performance. Also, you won't be able to report on the info easily.
2. Another approach is to create a separate table. You would have to maintain the table going forward. At its simplest implementation, the table could have fields for an asset, a stockroom, the date it arrived, and the date it left. Create business rules that maintain this table when Transfer Orders are completed or when an asset is assigned to a user. Using this approach, you can report on the new table to see "which asset was stocked in a particular stockroom in that month."

eferringtonFP also brought up an interesting idea when he mentioned turning on metrics. Jose said to use the following steps:

1. Create a metric definition with table = alm_asset and field = Stockroom.
2. Create a metric business rule on the alm_asset table. You can copy the one on the task table "metric events." You can find this under the Metrics module at Metrics -> Business Rules.
3. From this point on, whenever that field changes, a metric instance is created. This record contains the value of the field and the times it was of this value.
4. To report on this, you report on that instance table [metric_instance]. You can set the filter to be where table = alm_asset, field = stockroom, and (for example), where value = StockroomA and start+end date are within November. The assets in question would be the "ID" field.
5. To make it cleaner, you can create a database view and report on that view. For more information, see Database Views Plugin in the product documentation (http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Database_Views_Plugin).

For general information about metrics, see Metric Definition Support in the product documentation (http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Metric_Definition_Support).

Let me know if this information was useful!

Suzanne

[usuglatwala]

Thanks Suzanne for your detailed reply! I will look into the options that you mentioned. Using metrics might be the solution for us.