Blog IT asset life cycle management and its importance for your company

IT asset life cycle management and its importance for your company

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Great management is not related just to projects or people.  IT assets can be – and should be – managed too. Having a lifecycle of assets in mind can boost and prolong usability, as well as prevent possible drop-out of necessary tools.

 

What is IT asset life cycle management (ITALM)?

ITALM is a process in which an IT asset is planned for, acquired, used, maintained and disposed of when it reaches its useful life. By managing an asset efficiently, its lifespan can be extended, and investment return maximized.

Put simply, ITALM means that all the organization’s IT technology needs are met, and IT assets are used optimally and fully operational. ITALM involves keeping your inventory database up-to date, carrying out regular asset assessments and inspections to determine whether upgrades or replacements are required, and monitoring assets’ contractual terms.

 

Why is IT asset life cycle management important?

Capturing data of all the stages in an IT asset’s life cycle provides essential information for strategic planning and budgeting. An organization can only be operational to the degree that its assets are operational. A well-managed asset lifecycle will drive the assets’ cost optimization as human errors will be minimized, unnecessary purchases avoided, and asset usage optimized. With the deployment of successful asset life cycle management, the assets manager can gauge when an asset is at its peak performance and when further action needs to be taken.

 

What are the 5 stages of IT asset life cycle management?

The five stages of IT asset life cycle management are planning, acquisition, deployment/discovery, maintenance, and disposal. It is important to know what life cycle stage each IT asset is at to be able to draw up a strategic IT investment plan and control spending.

 

Request/Planning

The IT asset life cycle starts with planning or with a request as the need for an IT asset has to be identified. A strategic IT asset management plan allows you to assess whether procurement of a new IT asset aligns with business objectives and whether it fits your budget. At this stage, you will identify the asset’s specification according to where it will be used.

 

Procurement/Acquisition

If an IT asset in your inventory is about to retire or expire, you can order a replacement in due course. If the asset is not in your inventory database yet, you will need to raise a purchase order in a timely manner, so that workflow for the end-user will not be interrupted. It is worthwhile to explore free trials, deals or demos and compare pricing prior to purchase. It can save you money and provide you with valuable information when making the decision to purchase. The next step is adding the new asset to the inventory.

 

Deployment/Discovery

This is the stage when IT assets are deployed to end-users and change their status from a store to an in-use state. The software is allocated to hardware, a relationship to other devices is established, and installation downloads are performed and discovered in the organization’s network.

 

Maintenance, Upgrade and Repair

This is the longest stage of an asset’s life cycle and typically requires the most attention. Routinely maintained assets will serve you well in the long term and will maximize IT investment returns. All assets' events must be logged so the correct data about their conditions, value, ownership and depreciation can be used for audits and planning. The maintenance process includes scheduling scans and audits, software upgrades, and repairs. Monitoring software compliance, licenses’ and contracts’ expiration dates, and licenses’ usage are other examples of the IT assets’ maintenance stage.

 

Retirement/Disposal

When an IT asset reaches the end of its life, the status changes from in-use to expired or disposed. This process requires compliance with environmental and data security policies. To reduce the cost of disposal you can consider engaging a certified IT disposal company (some offer green IT disposal free of charge), or donations to educational entities locally or abroad. Some of the assets still can possess a re-sale value and can be offered to employees. During this process, any software allocated to the disposed asset will be un-allocated in the inventory. Regardless of the asset’s final disposition, it is crucial to make sure that data contained in disposed assets had been destroyed.

 

What is an IT asset’s event history?

An asset’s event is a record of change or modification of an asset through its lifecycle, such as purchasing, an upgrade, repair, scan, change of location or its owner, and disposal. The event’s history data provides data about the asset’s condition, usage, value and performance used for strategic planning.

 

Benefits of asset life cycle management solutions

With the right life cycle management software, you can analyze which assets are underperforming, track time and money spent on maintenance, track and report asset downtime, and determine when the assets are nearing the end of their life span. You will be able to schedule preventive maintenance and repairs and allocate funds for upcoming replacement. Automated ALCM software will unify all asset management processes on one platform. With the new information you gain, you can start making adjustments to optimize the assets’ efficiency and greatly improve your assets management practices.

Explore more about ITAM here: Learn about ITAM: Explore the benefits of IT Asset Management.

 

How Vault ERP can help you with IT asset life cycle management

Vault ERP offers all the necessary tools for managing your IT assets' life cycles to the highest standards. The Assets dashboard provides analytic data for a quick overview of assets by type – in store vs in-use, by warranty and by statuses. A list of recent purchases on the dashboard summarizes important updates. Easy navigation allows you to categorize assets, move and transfer them in-and-out, log their sighting and maintenance, add comments, reminders and tags. You can print asset labels, export reports, and view assets’ events history.

Navigation in Vault ERP is easy - multiple filters make asset search fast and settings allow you to customize fields that you want to be displayed. Integrating documents and checklist modules takes the asset management process to the next level. Creating a checklist for any of the asset’s life-cycle stages makes sure that repetitive tasks and procedures are followed, completed by assignees by set timelines, and not missed, thus assuring compliance.

Storing the whole assets inventory database and having all assets events history logged on to one platform will speed up decision making, assets deployment, technical support and improve overall organization performance.

Ready to improve your organization’s asset management? Book a free demo today to find out how Vault-ERP can help.

 

 

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