Tagging your Assets Makes your Asset Management and Help Desk More Efficient

Inventorying equipment (whether IT, furniture, telephone...) gives an accurate overview of corporate assets.

This provides answers to various questions such as:

• What are my assets made up of?
• Where are my assets?
• Who use my assets?
• How many assets do I have?

Once the inventory is carried out, we enter the management phase…

Managing equipment

Corporate assets (whether IT or non-IT) form a living set. Equipment can be moved, in repair, deleted (obsolete, broken, etc.) or disappear. To keep up-to-date about assets in a management software solution, you need to notify its moves and enter them in the database.

...this can come out as:

• The large black cupboard with grey plastic horizontal roll-shutters that used to be on the 2^nd floor in the room at the end of the corridor has been moved to the 3^rd floor in the third office on the left-hand side. We have replaced it by a new black and red cupboard, from the IKOAL supplier etc... (we spare you the rest of the story!)
• Other possibility: the cupboard N° 00123 has been moved from Room 204 to Room 345. It has been replaced by the cupboard N° 00233.

Managing equipment with bar code labels

Obviously, the second solution in the previous example is the most effective one, but it implies that:

• you are aware of every asset movement in your company,
• you update your database daily!

Combining these two conditions is far from easy as movements can be performed without being notified. Using bar code labels simplifies the management of these moves.

A technician equipped with a small portable terminal walks through the rooms of a company's building. He "beeps" the labels of the equipment he sees. Then he downloads the information collected in the terminal on its workstation and compares this information to the one in its database. Thus, he can see that the cupboard N° 00123 has been moved from Room 204 to Room 345 and that a new equipment N° 00233 can be found in the room. The base is updated within a mouse click...

Managing users (help desk)

In the context of a Hot Line department, we can hear this type of dialogue:

• User: "Hi, I'm Mister Martinau, I'm not in my office at the moment and I'm using my colleague's PC. I have a short memory message problem or something like that when I try to print a document. You want me to describe my PC? Well er... It's written Dell on it, with an Intel Inside sticker and er..."
• Support technician: "Could you give me the serial number behind your CPU?"
• User (after a loud paper-shuffle noise in the phone made by the 15 files usually stacked up on the CPU falling onto the floor...) : "Er... I think it is...".

OK, we're exaggerating a little bit... but not much.

Other possible dialogue:

• "Hi, I'm Mister Martinau, I'm not in my office and I'm using the workstation N° 000103."

A label stuck to remain visible on each piece of equipment significantly simplifies the dialogue between users and the IT department, as the tag number ensures the equipment uniqueness in the database and a fast search. Within one mouse click, you can view the configuration of the problematic station in the database.

Managing technicians

New equipment has been delivered. It has not gone through the normal circuit and has started operating. A technician has been sent on site to note its features. Once in the room, how will he distinguish the new piece of equipment from the equipment he inventoried a month before? A label on the equipment would prevent this problem.

Corporate management

A label reminds the user that the equipment is the company's property and not his…

To conclude, a judiciously stuck label means:

• Unique identification
• Immediate visual tracking
• Common language

Therefore, fast and efficient management!