Hardware Asset Management in the Work-From-Home Environment

Hardware asset management is often the task companies know needs to be done but never makes it to front runner in objectives. Software is usually the major focus, but this year things have changed. The pandemic has forced companies to address their hardware asset management with an urgency never felt before. Offices have closed, employees are working remotely, and companies have to figure out how to get their employees the hardware they need to do their jobs, as well as receive old hardware and retire assets.

Before COVID:

Before the pandemic, companies were already faced with serious challenges in getting an asset management system in place. These pre-existing conditions included:

1. Not knowing what they had and working with bad data
2. Tracking and managing done manually, with bad processes and human error
3. Complex legacy systems with no team alignment or executive support to update
4. Failed audits, security issues, and theft

After shut-down:

Add in a pandemic and these issues have become a top priority and even though they haven’t been solved, companies are now also trying to figure out:

• What did employees take home?
• What’s depreciating in storage?
• What should be returned, replaced or retired?
• Where is all the other stuff?

This results in increases in costs, employee workload, and overall frustration and a decrease in the ability to be in control. People are desperate for a solution and conversations are happening around tightening governance and process and adding checks and balances. This “doubling down” is a common reaction to a crisis, along with hoping it will simply go away, but this isn’t a holistic solution that is going to last. And the pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon.

There’s only one solution to improve and transform IT to be more capable:

Companies need to embrace a digital transformation.

The pandemic has brought an opportunity to build a digital solution for the future that gets people out of the complexity of hardware asset management. This means aligning service and technology and thinking more about the customer experience. Moving forward, everything will be measured differently because employees are at home. Their satisfaction level with their IT department will be how easy it is for them to get the hardware and assets they need delivered to them. Companies need to re-think operations and the value they’re looking to get out of their IT and digital systems.

There’s a lot of thought and effort going into this that isn’t needed.

Mike Loria, President and Founder of the premier integrated IT Asset Management services firm Re-Source Partners says, “Stop thinking about it. Let Re-Source partners think about it because it’s all we think about and all we do.”

Re-Source Partners is the answer to aligning service and technology and embracing a digital solution. Their team of hardware asset management experts will customize and deploy a solution using AMI’s AssetTrack, the #1 app for ServiceNow, allowing companies to focus on their core business, not their asset inventory.

After the pandemic hit, Re-Source Partners broke a record for a client when they deployed 1500 assets in less than a month to user’s individual home addresses. They were also able to recover 100% of the assets that were retired. “That’s the kind of leverage Re-Source Partners works to get for our clients, the ability to respond vs. react to a crisis,” Mike says.