Decommissioning of Hardware Assets

[daviddixon]

Hi Servicenow community!

We are currently investigating the ways in which we can process the decommissioning of our hardware assets and I was interested to see how others are currently utilizing Servicenow to perform this function.

In my construction of a framework to provide us full asset life-cycle management I am finding it difficult to conceive a method for the removal and destruction of hardware, with the government requirements for certification making things more complex and subsequently limited. In all of the research i have conducted I find that much is discussed regarding managing assets currently in use but once decommissioned in servicenow there is little to no guidance or peer-examples of how expired/destroyed/re-purposed assets are handled and reported against.

What we need is a method through the tool that would allow us to clearly move expired assets out of our fleet to the relevant external companies and be able to provide audit trails of all decommissioned assets containing the date of destruction, reason for decommision (eg EOL), relevant certificate and which vendor it went to. It is also required that part of the process contains reference to the Managerial approval of each individual asset being decommissioned but they want the ability to 'bulk approve'.

I have tried using External 'Stockrooms' and Transfer Orders to move assets out of the business but the complexity of reporting required is making this insufficient.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Kind Regards,

David Dixon

IT Purchasing Officer

PTAWA

[Community Alums]

Hi David,

This is a topic that we cover at a high level in the Asset Management course. Asset retirement is just one type of asset processes that you could manage in ServiceNow. If you are attending K16, I cover Asset retirement in my lab, Under the Hood with Company Assets 101. It runs at K16 three times:

• Tuesday, May 17 from 10 am - noon
• Tuesday, May 17 from 3:50 pm - 5:50 pm
• Wednesday, May 18 from 10 am - noon

The lab also covers CI decommissioning (where the CI is "retired" but the asset is placed back in stock for reuse).

All that being said, this is how I would approach what you are trying to do:

• Identify the steps in your asset retirement/decommission process. This is entirely separate from any tool.
• Identify any supporting documentation you need to save/track as part of the process.
• Determine how you want to track the overall retirement process. In the Asset course, we use a Change Request to manage the overall process and create tasks to manage the steps in the process.
• Determine the appropriate method(s) to begin the process. We use a related link, but you could look at other ways, too, such as a catalog request.
• Select a location to attach the certificate. We attach it to the Asset record in the course, but it could potentially be on a contract record with the disposal vendor and the asset could be associated with the contract.

ServiceNow is flexible enough to meet your needs and and allows you to focus on your process first and then apply it in ServiceNow.

I hope this helps get you going, and do be sure to reach out if you will be at K16.

Ben