Asset Life Cycle and IT inventory Management System

by Manya Verma Health care and lifestyle

There are three main stages in the lifecycle of an asset:

1. Beginning: It involves its procurement and purchase

2. Middle: This stage begins with installations and involves all activities involved during the course of the asset’s operation and usage including changes, additions and maintenance

3. End: This marks the retirement of the asset and involves its proper disposal and residual

Asset Management plays an extremely crucial role in managing the lifecycle of an asset by appreciating each phase of the lifecycle. This is important to maximize the efficiency of an asset and optimize resources in an organization.

For instance, it is advisable that IT assets must be managed beginning from the day of procurement. But research suggests that most of the corporates do not have an automated process to manage IT assets. Therefore, the need for IT asset tracking and IT inventory management is becoming imperative in organizations looking to manage their infrastructure for maximum productivity.

An automated IT asset management system is needed not only to optimize the cost of each asset but also to ensure compliance as per best practices. This can be achieved through the IT inventory management process at each stage of the assets’ lifecycle:

Procurement: IT inventory software provides procurement support that cannot be fulfilled through existing inventory to be included in bulk purchase orders. Upon asset delivery and acceptance, the purchase order and the individual request detail can be checked to ensure that only approved items are received.

Maintenance: Day to day IT operations involve adding, moving and changing. If these processes are automated with the help of IT inventory management system, it would lead to increase in efficiency.

Recognizing the costs, productivity levels and cycle times associated with various IMAC types can

help establish baselines for workload distribution and can also be used for chargeback systems. For

example, IT can show exactly how many IMACs per department were conducted with specific detail

on each one, illustrating the exact resource used by any given business unit.

Disposal: IT inventory management system supports in maintaining healthy records of all assets. This simplifies disposal process by replacing an asset before the end of its lifecycle without compromising on the productivity of the business and not overusing an asset beyond its limits. It also ensures proper compliance in disposal and residual process.

The challenge of IT asset management i.e. optimizing the lifecycle of each asset, can be converted in to its biggest opportunity with the help of an efficient IT inventory management software. Once an inventory is ready and complete configuration information is available, best practices such as establishing project milestones, specifying financial and operational goals, periodic reviews and similar activities can result in significant cost-saving and service improvements.