In this installment of the Model Management series, I cover some of the default fields included in the Model record and how they are used or can be used in your environment. If you have not read previous posts in this series, you can visit them on the community:
- Role Model, or Why Model Management is Important
- Models vs. Model Categories: Model Management, Part 2
- What's in a Name?: Model Management Part 3
- Which Model Is Which?: Model Management Part 4
- What Is Normal?: Model Management Part 5
- Model the Service Catalog: Model Management Part 6
Cost
The Cost field on the Model record serves two purposes:
- It provides a default value for new assets created manually in ServiceNow
- When the Model is published to the Service Catalog, the Cost is used to set the Price for the catalog item
Status and Certified
You may find that you have a large number of Models in your environment that you do not manage or purchase. To identify your production or certified models of device, you can use the Status and Certified fields.
The Status field has three default values: In Production, Retired, and Sold. In Production and Retired allow you to easily identify Models that you use in your production environment or previously used in your environment. You can add values to this to meet your needs, such as In Evaluation or Certification testing. You can create Workflow that supports testing or certification efforts around a Model based on these values and that set these values automatically as you complete certification testing. When a Model completes the certification process for use in your environment, you can mark it as Certified. These values can then be used to report on assets based on Models with different statuses that are certified or not in your environment.
Asset tracking strategy
Do you discover or inventory hardware for which you do not want to create assets? These devices could be employee or contractor owned devices that run your company owned software, so you need to capture that configuration related information to determine software compliance. For those Models of devices you know you do not purchase (perhaps identified through the Status and Certified fields), you can set the Asset tracking strategy to Don't create assets. This prevents any assets from being created for Configuration Items based on a particular Model.
The opposite situation may be true for some Models: You do not want CIs created for a particular Model of a device and you want to track quantities of it rather than individual assets. This is common for inexpensive monitors and printers. To handle this situation, you can set the Asset tracking strategy to Create consumable asset. The Model then behaves as a consumable even though the Model category is set to something besides Consumable.
Asset tracking strategy is covered in more detail in our Asset Management course.
Depreciation
If you work with depreciation in ServiceNow, you probably use the same depreciation schedule for a given Model. You can identify the Depreciation schedule in the Model record. The issue here is that it does not automatically translate to new assets based on the Model in the same way that Cost does, but ServiceNow, being the flexible system that it is, you can configure it to do so. The Cost, however, is configured to fill in as a Client Script. This only fills in the cost when you create the new asset in the interface. You may want to create a Business Rule to grab the Depreciation from the Model instead so that it adds the Depreciation to your assets regardless of how they are added to ServiceNow.
In Eureka this can be done without any scripting. Create a new Business Rule on the Hardware [alm_hardware] table as follows:
Name: Copy Depreciation from Model to Asset
Table: Hardware [alm_hardware]
Insert: checked
Filter Conditions: Depreciation | is empty (so you do not overwrite a manually input value)
Set field values: Depreciation | Same as | Model.Depreciation (Note: to get Model.Depreciation, you need to access the pull down a couple times to get the related information)
An additional note on this: To calculate Depreciation, you also need to include a Depreciation effective date and a Salvage value. You could determine how to set these values with the Business Rule. For example, do you want the depreciation to begin when the asset is purchased or when it is put in use? Set the Depreciation effective date to whichever makes the most sense to serve your purposes. If you work with a Salvage value other than zero, you may decide to include that value as a new field in the Model record.
Acquisition method
How do you acquire your hardware? Do you only lease or purchase a particular type of Model? Acquisition method allows you to identify how you procure a particular Model. Again, this does not automatically translate to the assets you create. A System Administrator could easily create a Business Rule to use the information from this field to set a default value on newly created asset records, similar to what was done above with Depreciation.
Picture
A picture is worth a thousand words. When you need to find hardware or order hardware, it can be useful to know what it looks like. The Picture field in the Product Catalog form section allows you to add a picture of the Model. This is visible in the Model record if you want to see what the Model looks like, and it also displays in the Service Catalog for end users when they order items.
Attachments
While not technically a field in the Model record, you should not overlook the value of attachments with regards to Models. Need ready access to the manual or specifications for the Model? Attach them to the Model record. Then when a technician is working on a Configuration Item based on that Model, she can easily access the manual for reference information.
These are fields included in ServiceNow by default. The next post will discuss some additional fields you can add to a Model record to make them even more useful.
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