How to Manage Leased Hardware Assets Effectively
Managing contracts for leased assets can be challenging, especially regarding the lease-end process. The critical difference between owned and leased assets is the importance of contract data during the lease expiration process. This step-by-step guide will help you manage expiring lease agreements and provide best practice recommendations.
To operate IT processes effectively, reliable data is the key. A lack of accurate and timely updates or imports can make data unreliable. Unreliable data can drive unreliable decisions, and this is particularly true of IT asset management. For example, if your ITAM data tells you that you have 100 assets with an expiring lease, but in reality, only 10 were ever received, you may decide to pay for a lease renewal on 90 assets that you don't even have. Not only does poor ITAM data for leased assets drive poor decisions, but it can also lead to wasted expenditures.
Recommendation:
- Work with your legal and procurement teams to ensure contract data on leased assets are held in ServiceNow
- Use our Advanced Shipment Notification import tool to import leased asset data automatically
- Automatically associate leased assets to contracts
- Proactively monitor expiring assets via the HAM dashboard
- Understand how the EOL processes affect your data
1. Work with your legal and procurement teams to ensure contract data on leased assets are held in ServiceNow
Contracts are often held in an external database outside of ServiceNow. It's important to work with your legal and procurement teams to get basic contract information. This step is crucial – you cannot manage your leased assets in SN without minimal contract information in the system.
Once you have approval, you have two options to keep the data up to date in ServiceNow.
- Schedule a Data Import with the contracting system of record. This approach assumes contract data is made available to ServiceNow via API and is the preferred method as it is more automated.
- Easy Import template to bring in contract data with the assistance of a ServiceNow administrator admin. This approach can get you going with contract import quickly by uploading files exported from your contract system.
Always look to remove the chance for human error by leveraging automation through integration. This is a critical step in the journey towards high-quality and accurate data. Work toward a minimum acceptable set of asset and contract data. To manage your leasing process, and particularly the lease-end process, this means populating the following attributes:
- Contract Start date
- Contract End date
- Vendor
- Contract model (Lease, Maintenance, Warranty, or Service Contract)
- Contract Administrator
- External Contract ID
- If integrating with a contract data system of record, you should add a field called External Contract ID to the contract record in ServiceNow. This will provide an external reference to that data source should you need it. The Contract number in ServiceNow is intended as an auto-generated key within ServiceNow only.
2. Use our ASN import to import leased asset data automatically
Use the Advanced Shipment Notification (ASN) import feature to create records for in-transit assets before they arrive at your facility. The ASN import feature allows administrators to upload asset serial numbers in bulk when shipped by your hardware supplier. This avoids hours of error-prone manual entry.
Work with your hardware supplier to agree on a regular cadence of sending/receiving ASNs and establish a procedure for administrators to follow. You should import these few attributes for every asset shipped:
- Serial number
- Model ID
- Vendor
- Manufacturer
The data in the asset record can then be further enriched throughout the events in its lifecycle, such as receiving and deployment.
3. Automatically associate leased assets to contracts
Associate assets to their corresponding contracts wherever possible. This is especially important with leased assets as this association enables much of the automated lease-end functionality in ServiceNow.
- ASN imports, scheduled integrations, and manual entry will all trigger an insert to the asset table. A business rule set to run upon the insert of an asset record can detect this action and then compare assets to contracts, establishing the needed association programmatically. Work with a ServiceNow developer to create this rule to meet your specifications.
- Similar functionality can be complete with transform maps if you are restricted from creating business rules.
- At times, you may need to manually associate assets to contracts. This can be done from the contract form by adding records to the Assets Covered related list.
4. Proactively monitor expiring assets with the HAM dashboard
With a good foundation of asset data, linked to contracts correctly, you can now begin to manage spending and track usage. Use the Hardware Asset Management (HAM) Dashboard to identify lease contracts nearing expiration. The “End of Life” tab has a section dedicated to Lease Contract Expiration. If you prefer working in the Hardware Asset Workspace, the Asset Estate section has a widget for leases expiring this year. However, this only gives a yearly view, not quarterly or monthly, as with the HAM Dashboard.
Automatic email notifications can be configured to go out to the contract administrator (identified on the contract record) when a contract is 30, 60, and 90 days from its expiration date. While not included by default, you should also consider adding a 120-day notification. This will ensure that you are aware of expiring contracts into the next quarter and can budget accordingly.
Double-check with the contract administrators periodically to ensure that these are being received, as email filtering rules can cause auto-generated emails to be ignored or sent to a junk folder. Given the challenges with managing work through email, this proactive method should be a secondary approach to regularly checking the HAM Dashboard.
5. Understand how the EOL processes work and how it affects your data
In ServiceNow, the End-of-Life process greatly impacts the quality of your leased asset data and Purchase Orders (PO’s). This should work well if ServiceNow is your system of record for PO’s and contracts. However, suppose you are using an alternative system for PO’s and contracts today. In that case, you should understand the out-of-box behavior (described below) and adjust as necessary to avoid data conflicts.
The EOL process is guided by a series of contract tasks visible from the asset form. To ensure you can see and act on these tasks, either use the Contracts form view of your leased assets or add the Contract Asset Tasks related list to a view of your choosing. The image below is of the asset form with the Contracts view enabled.
When an asset’s lease is expiring, three actions can be taken. Select which action you want to take from the contract record’s Leased Assets related list. This list only appears after you begin the lease expiration process. Each action has its own set of tasks, and affects asset data differently:
1. Return - Return your leased hardware asset
2. Extend - Extend your lease contract
3. Buyout – Buy out your leased hardware asset
