STORY: “Hannah and the Case of the Missing Hardware Assets”
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Chapter 4 – Deploy, Monitor, and Service: Is this a mid-life(cycle) crisis?*
With hardware models automatically normalized and with inventories completed on all the stockrooms and data centers at BrambleStatic*, Hannah has a clear view of what devices are in her environment.
But once the hardware assets are deployed, they leave Hannah’s control…or so she thinks.
In the past, trying to get laptops back from users was a painful process. She always had to budget for missing devices. And exchanging one device for another, well…let’s just say, the manual effort in transferring information from one device to another was painful and rarely accurate.
BrambleStatic* has Discovery already implemented. Hannah knows this creates asset records for her, but she really hadn’t looked further into how Discovery could help.
Discovery tells Hannah where her hardware assets are. Since they are discovered by IP Address, then she knows the exact location of that asset when it was last discovered. She can see hardware that has not been discovered recently but the asset record still shows In Use.
And with the integration of other discovery tools into ServiceNow, Hannah gets user information for these assets as well. Instead of expecting and just accepting missing hardware devices, Hannah and her team now have a list of missing hardware assets, their most recent location and their most recent users. Hannah can go directly to these users and locate these missing devices.
One huge problem solved!
But what about the missing assignment, support and warranty information?
Well, Asset Actions came to the rescue. When a device is swapped out for another device on an incident, all of the contracts and allocations are automatically transferred to the new device. No more manual updates of asset states, locations, stockrooms, and user assignments. Contracts and allocations will follow the swap automatically.
And these Asset Actions, well they can deploy an asset from incident or change or they can set a device to be repaired.
Speaking of repairs, service of devices has always been a huge pain point for BrambleStatic*. Techs not knowing which vendor to send devices for repair. Techs paying additional repair costs.
Well, now that hardware assets have support contracts associated to them as well as vendor and warranty information, techs can make faster and more cost-effective decisions about repairs. Techs can see if an asset is still covered under warranty or an existing support contract BEFORE paying any additional repair costs. And all the vendor contact information is listed right there with the asset; speeding up the time to get the device repaired.
Stay tuned for Hannah’s next step on the HAM journey: A farewell to harmful, disposal processes.
For more information on Hardware Asset Management, go to servicenow.com/HAM
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*The details of the company described in this story are fictional and only represent the profile of a Fortune 500 company. The details are not indicative of any existing company, past or present.
