How to manage assets for large organizations

How to manage assets for large organizations

If you have decided to cut down the cost on assets purchased on different geographies or want to manage assets and licenses centrally to have better negotiations with vendors, here is the complete process you can manage effectively. Here are some facts

• The cost of  hardware and software assets constitute a large % of the total global IT budget
•   As a result, it’s critical that IT is able to consistently and accurately report on these assets
•   Good asset reporting is not only important for managing the IT budget but is critical to ensuring that risk to Organization associated to audit/compliance from external vendors is mitigated
•   IT asset reporting is inconsistent which creates general challenges

• Anytime procurement and finance requires asset information it requires a significant amount of effort to coordinate the collection of information within IT
• Very complicated to manage software licensing across the various countries making it difficult to both coordinate vendor audits and negotiate global software purchasing agreements

Phase 1 – Information Collection

Phase 2 – Finding right tool

Phase 3 – Data Importing & Integration

Phase 4 – Define new process

Phase 5 – Handover/closure

Phase 1: information collection Objective and scope

• Generate a set of standard asset reports and associated processes
•   These standard reports and processes will include

• Reports available to management on a consistent basis
• Standard tool/system for reporting
• Reporting on a standard set of information for all assets
• Consistent process for collecting asset information

•   The ITAssetManagement.in software scope will include

• ALL Hardware and Software assets managed by IT
• ALL countries managed by IT

Asset Management Reporting – Phase 1 (Information Collection) (Send these to your local team)

• The first step in establishing the baseline information is for representatives from each region to coordinate the completion of a standard questionnaire for each of the countries in their region
• Upon completion of this questionnaire a series of individual and team meetings will be scheduled to confirm the questionnaire responses and refine the information when necessary

•   The following slides will provide information to assist in completing the questionnaire

• Further clarification of specific questions
• For some questions there will be specific list of potential answers

•   Guidelines for completing the questionnaire

• Ensure that a response has been provided to ALL questions
• A separate questionnaire should be completed for each country region
• If there are any concerns or questions that arise during the completion of the questionnaire please make sure to copy the entire team as it may be useful to them

Question related to Hardware

For questions on the Software tab provide a response for each software asset category separately.  The following is a list of the types of software included in each of the asset vendor categories.   This should be used as reference and is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of the software

Phase 2 – Finding right tool

Every local office has their own way to manage assets like excel sheet, local software. Find the right tools are not easy, remembers new tool must have following option:

1. User friendly
2. Customizable
3. Web-based
4. Database integration
5. Cost Effective

Here is the some comparison of various tools which include open source and paid

We would personally recommend IT Asset management.in tool however there are couple free tools that you can use from here : Click here

Phase 3:

Analyze the information you collected and prepare the data import plan either with help of vendor or with your team In case if you need more details about process and excel sheet format in which you can ask your team to provide details. Please send us email at contact@itassetmanagement.in or stay tuned for the next blog.