Is your IT team tired of managing the infrastructure hardware, facility and infrastructure lease agreements, in-house developed software, software licenses, company owned end user devices or digital data from operations? An ITAM Software comes as a savior to your organization’s IT team. The usual hustle and bustle with excel sheets and losing your mind over misplaced or forgotten assets can be completely avoided with a software that can manage the humongous amount of asset data within your organization. This software acts as a virtual organizer that is more user friendly and accessible, thereby eliminating inefficiency. The initial set up can be time consuming and tedious, but once you are set you will start seeing the difference it makes in your organization.

In general, IT Asset Management (ITAM) is a repository that collects detailed information on the hardware and software inventories. ITAM acts as an integration of financial, contractual and functional attributes of any asset in an organization. Maintaining an accurate record of all the IT assets helps the organization to increase the effectiveness of their asset usage and avoid unnecessary asset purchases by recycling/ reusing the existing resources. It acts as a central hub that helps you to manage your assets proactively.

 

Better Tracking

Asset tracking involves combining physical devices, barcode scanners, desktop software and mobile devices to modernize the asset tracking technology from acquisition to retirement in an organization. This is considered as the major benefit of Asset Management Software. Imagine an organization with tons of assets and the IT team managing them with multiple excel sheets with too many rows and columns of information and losing track of who has what. Mad right? By using this software, everything becomes organized and transparent for everyone. It becomes easier to find out what was leased, its current location and what it’s used for.  This also acts as a base for the other benefits.

 

Operations Efficiency

An organization becomes more efficient when it’s needs align with existing abilities. To plan out where one has to spend more to strengthen their game and where precisely they should save money by eliminating certain assets which can be considered inefficient. From this, one can understand what assets are at the best interest from the organization’s perspective. Focusing on these and upgrading them proves to be more effective in a long term process.

 

Cost Savings

The journey of an asset in an organization is not over once it’s been delivered to the person who needed it. The cost paid to acquire the asset would be assumed to be enough but one forgets the maintenance cost for the healthy lifecycle of an asset. If an effective Asset Management System is not present, more than half the assets would be misplaced or forgotten, which would have led to the IT team buying more and more assets that already exist somewhere in the company.

 

Standardization

When an IT equipment or software does not meet the standards it costs the IT team their productivity. This is because they are not trained to manage non-standard assets. Therefore, each issue takes a long time to be solved, since every issue raised will be unique and takes different methods to resolve it. If the organization uses standard assets it wouldn’t only improve the productivity of the IT team but also the employees who use the product which they are familiar with and which is also not faulty.

 

Financial Reporting

We all know maintaining financial records is a Herculian task. A small error in monetary or fiscal policies can lead to a lot of trouble. Hence, the cost of all hardware components and software licenses needs to be accounted for. This list will not only include the cost of purchase of the products but also their maintenance cost if they had any. Keeping track of these can become difficult because there are too many assets in an organization to keep track of. Here an Asset Management tool can save you from drowning into account books. It is advisable to be very careful and transparent when it comes to maintaining your financial records.

 

Risk Management

Technology risks can arise in different forms, like financial risk, operational risk, security risk etcetera. It is impossible to avoid the risks altogether, but it should be our responsibility to take the necessary steps and try to avoid these risks and the impact it creates within an organization. The key to avoiding these risks is to make informed decisions. The management of the asset data can be considered as a part of the problem, but the actual challenge is to get the information into the hands of people who will be able to make risk management decisions. One will realize the value of ITAM to Risk Management when accurate asset information is consumed and not when it is produced.

 

Forecasting

ITAM gives an accurate acquisition history of the assets within an organization which will empower the IT team to better understand and forecast the required assets for the future use of the organization. The IT team can identify new trends and implement them for further development. It will also be more comfortable for the budget predictions as the IT team can try to come up with a super effective and a cost efficient strategy for the upcoming years.

There is absolutely no doubt initiating your organization on an asset management journey will be an immensely arduous process. The IT teams know that without Asset Management most of the information exists in discrete places and cannot be easily tracked or accessed in a unified manner. Therefore, Asset Management comes as a solution to one of the major hassles in an organization. If you make the best use of the software, you save money, time and lots of resources.

I know you now want to get your organization an Asset Management Software to increase your productivity. Confused which ITAM tool you should go for? Here is a list of Top Asset Management Softwares in the play. Research which software suits the best for your organization and go for it.