Enterprise IT Asset Management: Optimizing the Asset Lifecycle at Scale

While managing IT assets can be difficult for small to mid-sized companies, enterprises with hundreds or even thousands of employees face immense logistical challenges. 

That’s where enterprise IT asset management comes in. 

It helps you take control of your assets and efficiently manage the lifecycle from start to finish. 

What is Enterprise IT Asset Management?

It involves overseeing, monitoring, and optimizing enterprise IT assets throughout their lifecycle. The exact steps can vary from company to company, but the typical asset lifecycle includes:

• Procurement
• Tracking
• Storage
• Retrieval

The purpose of enterprise asset management is to develop a reliable framework that allows your organization to streamline each step in the asset lifecycle so that it’s predictable, efficient, secure, and profitable, while ensuring compliance every step of the way. 

And by using reporting and analytics, as most enterprise asset management software platforms offer, you can continually make smarter decisions and maximize asset usage. 

The key difference between asset management on the enterprise level as opposed to small to mid-sized businesses is the sheer volume of IT assets that must be accounted for. 

While smaller operations may need to manage a handful of monitors, laptops, mobile devices, and accessories, enterprises tend to have significantly more IT assets. 

For instance, it’s common for enterprises to have servers, network devices, numerous IoT devices, cloud services, and even data center assets. 

Therefore, enterprises need robust asset management software that’s equipped to handle this type of scale while ensuring asset reliability, seamlessly scheduling maintenance activities, reducing asset downtime, and boosting overall asset performance. 

And for many organizations, asset management is heavily involved with fleet management, labor management, work management, and enterprise resource planning — making it an integral part of operations. 

How Enterprise Asset Management Works

Procurement

The first phase of the process is acquiring IT assets. 

Whether it’s something straightforward like desktop monitors, laptops, and mobile devices, or something more involved like servers and network devices, you need a reliable way of procuring all of the equipment required to run your enterprise. 

And there’s a lot more to it than simply buying IT assets. You also need to take into account things like:

• Finding reliable vendor
• Asset availability
• Asset performance management
• Asset lifespan
• Contract negotiation
• Work order management
• Service management
• Asset maintenance management
• Bulk ordering

Also, if you have global operations (as many enterprise companies do), you need to figure out how you’ll efficiently distribute IT assets to workers spread throughout the world. 

Because of the inherent complexities involved with enterprise asset management, many companies opt for IT procurement services and/or a computerized maintenance management system like allwhere or the IBM Maximo Application Suite rather than doing it in-house. 

allwhere, for example, specializes in global procurement and can help you find the exact equipment you need to cater to an international workforce, and creates kits based on team, role, geography, and more. 

And unlike many IT asset services that rely on a single vendor, allwhere branches out and has connections to a huge network of vendors. 

So even if one vendor doesn’t carry a particular item or is out of stock, we can easily find an alternative, so you get the IT assets you need, regardless of specifications, with no hassle.

Tracking

Visibility is essential at every stage of enterprise asset management. 

You want to know: 

• Exactly which IT assets you have on hand through asset discovery
• Which employees have what assets
• Detailed asset information for your maintenance operation
• What your collective inventory looks like
• What’s in transit and what’s in storage
• Info on order management, service management, and maintenance management

And when it’s time for retrieval, you want to stay in the loop with frequent updates until equipment arrives safely at the right facility. 

Any quality enterprise asset management software will offer detailed real-time tracking, so there’s never any guesswork, and you’re in total control of your IT assets at all times.

Ideally, IT inventory tracking software will provide a holistic vantage point of every asset in your inventory and will be automatically updated as new devices enter and old devices leave. 

Further, it’s important to have access to a centralized dashboard on an EAM system so asset data is visible at a glance, allowing for effortless asset lifecycle management. 

That way, no matter how large your enterprise is and how scattered your employees may be, you’ll always have peace of mind.

Storage

Not every physical asset will be used at all times. During the fixed asset management lifecycle, many enterprises will have a certain percentage of assets in storage that may need to undergo repairs, have parts replaced, or simply be on standby until an employee needs them. 

Therefore, storage is another critical stage of asset lifecycle management, and you need to have an EAM system in place where you can quickly deploy a device from a facility at a moment’s notice. 

That’s why EAM software isn’t just designed for tracking assets that are in transit, but also those that are in storage. 

This typically works by accessing a single dashboard on an enterprise asset management system, where you can see which devices have been deployed and which are currently being stored.

Note that some enterprises have their own centralized storage facilities where they keep devices. This is more common for larger companies with thousands of employees that require extensive maintenance management or experience high device turnover. 

However, for smaller enterprises or those with primarily global operations, it’s common to outsource to a third-party because of the logistical, compliance, and security challenges. 

allwhere, for example, has a centralized depot where IT assets can be stored, and enterprises can use a convenient dashboard filter on their EAM software to see what’s currently in storage. 

Retrieval

The final stage of asset lifecycle management is equipment retrieval, which can be needed for a few reasons. 

Sometimes an employee is offboarding and needs to return their IT assets. Other times, equipment has reached the end of its asset lifespan and needs to be replaced with a newer version before asset failure occurs. 

Retrieval may be part of a device recall due to security patch needs or hardware faults. Or, it may be compliance-driven, where regulations mandate that new equipment must be distributed to your workforce. 

Whatever the case, you need a means of efficiently retrieving a critical asset, assessing asset condition, and determining what to do next. 

If, for example, a mobile device needs some components fixed but could still be used with the proper repair, you may have it fixed and resell it in a secondary market to extend the asset life and maximize your ROI. 

Note that security is a top concern with asset retrieval. Because of the sensitive data that’s often contained within a device, it’s crucial that security best practices like data wiping and having a clear chain of custody are followed.

Software Considerations

Up until this point, we’ve primarily discussed enterprise asset management within the context of physical enterprise assets like monitors, laptops, and mobile devices. 

But given that many enterprises use a wide mix of SaaS software, desktop software, and cloud services to achieve operational efficiency, software asset utilization should also be taken into consideration. 

The three main areas to focus on here are visibility, compliance, and security. 

Just like managing hardware in inventory management, it’s also important to have full transparency of all the different software systems your enterprise uses at any given time. 

This is crucial for knowing what you have for order management, ensuring that it’s being used efficiently, and for preventing duplicate subscriptions. 

For compliance, this mainly involves ensuring your software licenses with each vendor are up-to-date and that regulatory compliance standards with industry regulations like the GDPR and HIPAA are being upheld. 

As for security, you need to protect your enterprise by continually looking for outdated or unauthorized software, as this can potentially compromise asset data and asset performance. 

International Considerations

Seldom do modern enterprises operate in a single location. Most have offices, departments, and employees scattered all over the world. 

For that reason, a core part of enterprise asset management is accounting for the logistics involved with globalized operations. 

Here are some examples.

• Sourcing IT assets from local regions throughout the world
• Handling cross-border customs, taxes, and regulations when distributing equipment to employees in different countries
• Dealing with the logistical complexities of returning remote work devices, along with employee communication 
• Accounting for multiple time zones during employee and service management communication
• Responsibly disposing of IT assets that have reached the end of their lifespan and can’t be refurbished (some countries are stricter than others about e-waste)

Because of the challenges that come with international operations, many enterprises opt for using IT asset management services and/or enterprise asset management software to streamline the process. This brings us to our conclusion. 

Use allwhere for Your IT Asset Management

If you’re looking for a one-stop shop EAM system that seamlessly handles the asset lifecycle end-to-end, you’ll want to check out allwhere. 

allwhere is the simplest way to manage IT assets globally and offers hands-off procurement, asset tracking, storage, and retrieval, so you don’t have to do it yourself. 

Again, we have an extensive vendor network, which allows us to procure the equipment you need quickly, securely, and at scale. 

We cater to globalized teams and handle everything from cross-border procurement, customs, compliance, and local sourcing, so the logistics and communication ar taken care of for you. 

All aspects of tracking can be done conveniently within our EAM software, so you’re never in the dark as to the location of an asset, when it’s in transit, and when it’s in storage.

We also make retrieval a breeze and can efficiently collect numerous assets like monitors, mobile devices, peripherals, and specialty equipment at the scale your enterprise needs. 

And because we have no platform fees and pay-as-you-go pricing with no minimum, you can right-size your enterprise asset management without overspending. Get started with allwhere today.