Looking to gain control over your technology investments? The ServiceNow Asset Management solution provides the tools you need to efficiently manage your hardware, software, and cloud assets. This guide will explore its key features, share best practices for optimizing your asset management processes, and offer practical tips for leveraging the platform to streamline operations and reduce costs in your organization.
Understanding ServiceNow Asset Management
ServiceNow Asset Management is an essential tool for modern IT environments, offering powerful workflow automation and process optimization capabilities to help you streamline operations. The platform enables the management of various types of assets, including software licenses, hardware assets, and cloud assets, providing a comprehensive solution for all your asset management needs. ServiceNow modernizes IT asset management processes to ensure they are efficient and streamlined, aligning with overall organizational goals.
ServiceNow seamlessly integrates with your existing software applications, ensuring smooth interoperability and boosting the overall efficiency of your IT operations. By standardizing your asset data and providing unprecedented visibility into all your assets, this platform improves decision-making and enhances IT service efficiency. You can be confident that your asset management processes will not only be practical but also fully aligned with your business strategy, driving your organization toward success through its powerful integration capabilities.
Key Features
- Comprehensive Asset Lifecycle Management: The platform provides a single solution for managing assets from procurement and deployment to maintenance and disposal. It tracks the financial, contractual, and inventory details of hardware, software, and cloud assets throughout their entire lifecycle.
- Software Asset Management (SAM): This module helps you track software usage and manage license entitlements. By doing so, it ensures your organization remains compliant and enables you to reduce costs by identifying and reallocating underutilized licenses.
- Automated Workflows: ServiceNow Asset Management automates key processes like asset provisioning, stock replenishment, and maintenance scheduling. This reduces manual effort, minimizes human error, and improves overall operational efficiency.
- Centralized Asset Repository: The system acts as a single source of truth for all your assets, consolidating data on hardware, software, and cloud resources into one unified platform. This centralized view enhances visibility and supports better decision-making.
- Hardware Asset Management (HAM): This specific feature focuses on managing physical assets, including everything from laptops and servers to mobile devices. It helps you track inventory, automate the lifecycle, and manage maintenance to improve operational efficiency and ensure timely asset replacements.
Optimizing Software Asset Management
Optimizing software asset management is crucial for any organization looking to maximize the value of its software investments. ServiceNow’s Software Asset Management application provides preconfigured dashboards with actionable data visualizations, enabling businesses to track software assets effectively. This includes ownership, location, usage frequency, configuration times, costs, and value, ensuring comprehensive asset tracking. These tools help organizations comply with core policies, contracts, and regulatory standards, reducing the risk of non-compliance and associated fines.
Tracking Software Usage
Organizations can use the Software Spend Detection feature to monitor and report on software spending effectively, helping to allocate resources more efficiently and reduce costs. Predicting normalized values using machine learning can improve normalization rates of discovered data, leading to more accurate software usage reports. This level of precision is crucial for optimizing license allocation and identifying cost-saving opportunities, ensuring that organizations are not overspending on unused licenses.
Accurate monitoring of software usage also enables organizations to generate detailed reports and dashboards, providing insights into software utilization patterns. These insights help in making informed decisions about license renewals, purchases, and reallocations, ultimately leading to a more efficient and cost-effective software asset management strategy.
Managing Software Entitlements
Software entitlements represent the rights for purchased software, including information like the number of rights purchased and their associated costs. Proper management of these entitlements ensures that organizations are using their software licenses correctly and are in compliance with licensing agreements. Publisher packs in ServiceNow Software Asset Management enhance functionality for tracking and optimizing licensing with specific software publishers, mitigating difficulties in tracking license compliance across various software programs.
ServiceNow allows for the efficient management of software rights by enabling updates to software entitlements both individually and in bulk. This flexibility helps organizations maintain accurate records and ensures that their team is not over-purchasing or under-utilizing software licenses to meet demand.
Enhancing Hardware Asset Management
Enhancing hardware asset management is essential for maintaining the efficiency and performance of an organization’s IT infrastructure. The Hardware Asset Workspace in ServiceNow provides a centralized view of hardware assets, offering visibility into life cycle status, health, and other asset details. This centralized approach helps organizations monitor models that are reaching end-of-life, ensuring timely replacements and minimizing operational risks.
ServiceNow supports efficient procurement processes by allowing users to create purchase orders that capture financial details at procurement time, streamlining the acquisition of new hardware. Additionally, mobile capabilities enable users to manage and receive assets against purchase orders efficiently, enhancing overall asset management operations. ServiceNow’s hardware asset management tools improve data quality, inventory process compliance, and support informed decisions about asset performance and lifecycle costs.
Automating the Hardware Lifecycle
Automating the hardware lifecycle is a game-changer for organizations looking to streamline operations and reduce manual effort. The Hardware Asset Management application automates each stage of the asset lifecycle, from acquisition through to disposal, ensuring a seamless and efficient process. This automation helps eliminate the risk of data inaccuracy from manual entry, enhancing the overall reliability of asset records.
ServiceNow’s powerful platform capabilities facilitate streamlined operations by assigning asset tasks to Incident, Change, and Work orders, improving service delivery, and ensuring that assets are managed effectively. Additionally, opting into the Hardware Asset Management Content Service for asset data normalization ensures consistent and accurate asset data.
Automated workflows significantly enhance hardware asset management processes and reduce operational complexities. A structured approach to asset data helps identify vulnerabilities and manage risks effectively, ensuring that organizations can make informed decisions about their hardware assets.
Refreshing Aging Hardware Assets
Refreshing aging hardware assets is crucial for maintaining optimal performance and minimizing operational risks. Regularly assessing hardware performance metrics helps identify aging hardware that may need to be replaced, ensuring that the organization continues to operate efficiently. Replacing old hardware with new hardware is a fundamental strategy to ensure continued efficiency and performance.
Regularly refreshing hardware assets maintains optimal performance, reduces the risk of failures, and keeps IT infrastructure up-to-date, supporting business operations. ServiceNow’s hardware asset management tools provide the insights needed to make informed decisions about hardware replacements, ensuring that organizations can maintain a reliable and efficient IT environment.
Utilizing Asset Data and Dashboards
Utilizing asset data and dashboards is essential for gaining real-time operational insights and making informed decisions about IT asset management. ServiceNow’s Asset Management module includes features for real-time operational insights through configurable dashboards, enhancing decision-making and strategic planning. Analytical insights from asset data can significantly improve operational visibility, enabling organizations to identify opportunities for improvement and refine asset management practices.
Clear visibility into software entitlements allows organizations to allocate resources effectively and avoid over-purchasing, ensuring that their IT investments are optimized. Creating a baseline inventory of assets enables informed decision-making, helping organizations to manage their IT assets more effectively and efficiently, leading to improved visibility.
Normalizing Asset Data
Data normalization is essential for ensuring uniformity and consistency across IT assets. Standardizing asset data helps ensure reliable information is accessible for effective decision-making throughout the organization. This process eliminates discrepancies and ensures consistent reporting and analysis across various departments.
Standardizing asset data formats is crucial for maintaining accuracy and preventing redundancy within an organization’s records. Normalizing asset data improves the reliability of asset records, enhances decision-making, and ensures efficient IT asset management processes.
Analyzing Asset Performance
Analyzing asset performance is key to identifying inefficiencies and potential cost reductions. Dashboards facilitate real-time monitoring of asset performance, enabling organizations to:
- Quickly identify underutilized software and reduce unnecessary licensing costs
- Track compliance metrics
- Uncover potential cost reductions
- Inform choices about asset utilization and maintenance
Effective tracking of cloud infrastructure costs can lead to informed decision-making and improved financial performance, ensuring that organizations can optimize their IT investments. ServiceNow’s analytical tools provide valuable insights into asset performance, drive cost savings, and enhance IT asset management strategy, ultimately helping to manage asset costs effectively.
Streamlining Workflow Automation
ServiceNow’s core automation capabilities help reduce operational complexities, allowing for the integration of various processes and enhancing efficiency across asset management tasks. Automated workflows can significantly enhance software asset management by streamlining tasks, minimizing manual input, and improving productivity.
ServiceNow’s workflow automation reduces operational costs, improves service delivery, and facilitates efficient asset management processes. Automated notifications about critical lease dates can prevent penalties related to missed renewals, ensuring that organizations stay compliant and avoid unnecessary costs.
Reducing Manual Effort
Automated workflows in ServiceNow are designed to cut down on manual tasks, thereby streamlining asset management operations and increasing accuracy. By eliminating repetitive tasks, organizations can significantly reduce the time spent on manual processes, leading to faster and more efficient operations.
Automation enables users to focus on more strategic tasks, improving overall productivity and ensuring that asset management processes are as efficient as possible. Automated workflows enhance the accuracy and speed of asset management operations, leading to better outcomes and reduced costs.
Improving Service Delivery
Efficient asset tracking within ServiceNow enhances service delivery by ensuring better allocation of resources to various tasks. This leads to quicker response times for service requests and enhanced service quality.
Regular assessments of hardware performance can help in timely replacements to mitigate risks, ensuring that organizations can maintain optimal performance and avoid the risk of hardware failures. ServiceNow’s automation capabilities improve service delivery, enhance service quality, and ensure IT infrastructure reliability.
Managing Maintenance and Lease Contracts
Managing maintenance and lease contracts effectively is crucial for avoiding penalties and ensuring timely renewals. Organizations can avoid penalties on expiring maintenance and lease contracts by getting notified and taking action before contracts expire. The Hardware Asset Dashboard can be used to view expiring contracts, providing a centralized view of contract status and ensuring that renewals are managed efficiently.
Centralizing lease data enhances transparency and enables better tracking of renewals and expirations, while establishing standard practices for lease changes and terminations is essential for accurate financial reporting. Effective management of expiring maintenance and lease contracts avoids penalties, ensures timely renewals, and maintains accurate financial records.
Accelerating ITAM Strategy Implementation
Accelerating ITAM strategy implementation requires a phased approach to avoid overwhelming challenges and ensure successful execution. Key aspects include:
- Breaking down the process into manageable phases to prioritize projects based on potential benefits.
- Focusing resources on the most impactful initiatives.
- Communicating the value of asset management initiatives to secure ongoing support from stakeholders.
- Ensuring the strategy is aligned with organizational goals.
Involving various business units enhances the effectiveness of asset management by ensuring alignment across departments, leading to a more cohesive and efficient implementation. Following these best practices accelerates ITAM strategy implementation, driving better business outcomes and ensuring the success of asset management efforts.
Get Started with Our Experts
Surety Systems offers a wealth of experience to every project, providing the strategic guidance and deep technical knowledge needed to ensure success. Our senior-level ServiceNow consultants excel at aligning IT initiatives with overarching business goals, bridging communication between different teams and business units to foster a unified approach.
By leveraging our comprehensive expertise, you can confidently navigate complex implementations, optimize workflows, and customize your ServiceNow platform to meet your unique needs, guaranteeing a solution that is not only successful but also perfectly aligned with your organizational strategy.
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For more information about our ServiceNow consulting services or to get started on a project with our team, contact us today.
