Asset Approvals
Protect your business assets and reduce costs
The scope of any organisation’s asset management needs is likely broad. These needs can range from managing IT assets – across hardware, software, and services – to other business functions’ physical and digital assets.
IT asset management (ITAM) needs are a good example because there are many operational, management, and governance aspects to consider. For instance, in reducing asset-based wastage (where the organisation is unnecessarily incurring asset-related costs), through periodical asset audits, to ensuring software-licence compliance.
Managing assets efficiently and effectively
Many organisation’s find effective asset management difficult. For example, with ITAM, while the use of discovery and focused ITAM tools will help understand the current state of the network-connected IT estate – what about non-connected IT assets? Or the non-IT assets of other business functions. Plus, there might be missing capabilities. For example, not all organisations have the need or budget to invest in software usage monitoring tools, potentially leaving a key asset management opportunity unaddressed.
Consequently, organisations need to rely on other methods for ascertaining asset statuses, such as physical audits and email-based surveys. But neither is an effective way to quickly get a timely and complete understanding of a business function’s asset estate.
The problem
A multi-national professional services company was struggling with asset management, knowing that it needed to add extra capabilities related to operational efficiency, management effectiveness, and governance needs.
It realised that addressing the need for more effective asset management capabilities required a better way to engage employees in asset management practices, to get greater insight into asset ownership and use in particular.
Improving asset management with Heed
After considering various potential improvement opportunities, the company now uses Heed to manage its asset estate better – from receiving greater insight into IT assets and their use to achieving greater control of the assets employed in other business functions.
The Heed messaging workflow platform allows the company to proactively and efficiently gain insight into the employee use of business assets. This understanding is achieved both directly and indirectly, with any asset-management-related communications suitably prioritised within an employee’s consolidated message stream. Based on urgency, Heed also pushes these messages as device-based notifications.
An example of a direct asset management capability is Heed sending an “audit” message that allows an employee to quickly respond on asset attributes such as asset “ownership”, location, health, and ongoing need via action buttons. There’s also the ability to report any additional assets in their possession. The original asset-audit messages are revised or automatically removed when other employees account for such assets to avoid unnecessary time-wasting.
An example of an indirect asset management capability is using the feedback from other message interactions for asset management purposes. For instance, an IT service desk communication to all employees with a particular asset type – perhaps that a specific laptop make needs a replacement power pack for safety reasons – can include actions such as:
- “I’ll collect”
- “Please post”
- “I don’t have it”
- “I no longer use it”
Here, the responses fulfil either an audit need or provide the ability to reduce asset wastage caused by incorrect provisioning.
How Heed helped
With Heed, the company’s IT department and other business functions now have additional and more effective asset management capabilities that increase asset insight, reduce costs and improve governance, and – importantly – cause minimal friction to employees and their productivity.
Notable benefits include:
- A reduction in the need to purchase new assets, especially software, thanks to proactive asset retrieval and redistribution, resulting in savings of $2 million over years 1 and 2
- Increased governance and an associated reduction in audit management costs of $1 million over years 1 and 2
- A reduction in net asset management costs – where more is now achieved for less, saving £600,000 over years 1 and 2
