Best practice to model mobile lines as assets

[jose_quinonez]

Hi everyone!

We have an inventory of mobile lines for employees. Most of the cases, those lines come with a mobile device; but in a few cases, employees use their own personal mobile device, so the company only accounts for the SIM.
The mobile device can change over time, but the line remains the same.
We want to keep track of service lines, their contract renewal, but also we want to know which devices are more problematic.

I was thinking about creating a hardware asset, use the line number as the id, and use the device model when it applies (or leave it blank when employee uses his/her own device).

I would like to know what is the best practice to handle the mobile line as an asset in ITSM Asset Management, and what would be the recommendation for the equivalent CI?

Thank you

[Abbas_5]

Hello @jose_quinonez ,

Please refer to the below link:
https://www.servicenow.com/community/itsm-forum/how-do-you-handle-mobile-devices-in-asset-management...

If it is helpful,please mark it as helpful.

Thanks & Regards,
Abbas Shaik

[jose_quinonez]

Thank you Abbas. I had already read that article.

My main concern is about how to handle the line number as an asset (not the mobile device itself).  My current approach is to create a hardware asset (type mobile) and identify the asset by the phone number. 

My second concern is how to handle the corresponding CI (I guess that the referred article applies to the CMDB part).

Thanks

[shloke04]

Hi @jose_quinonez ,

Did you reach to a solution on how you handled this scenario? I have a similar use case and would be great if you can share the solution which you have implemented for this.

Thanks!

[damianfell]

I'm also curious about people's thoughts here, some years ago we created a custom class to hold what are essentially telephony subscriptions. Some for smartphones and tablets, some for old school candy-bar phones (the immortal Nokia 5110 still lives!) quite a lot of e-sims in industrial devices, and a smattering of mobile wifi devices.

The data comes from the telephony providers and is primarily a list of lines with other unique identifiers such as current SIM, Current IMEI, etc...

It's always been hard to explain to people that we aren't recording mobile devices despite the description containing words like "Apple iPhone".

With the advent of the handheld computing class and the move to InTune the devices are now sorted, but for the rest we are looking for an appropriate CMDB class, asset class, contract type or other out of the box solution to allow us to remove the custom class from our tech debt list.