Resource Booking

Afternoon all...

the company i work for has grown rapidly in the last 2 years. im now finding it difficult to keep tabs on everything that's borrowed (Laptops, Phones etc)

what do you use in your company to manage pool hardware?

thanks

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sasnimrod

I think it would be a good starting point to label each hardware asset with a unique inventory number. Depending on the amount of hardware that is being borrowed I would suggest that you store this in an Excel Sheet containing info such as the following: Hardware Name (e.g. Google Nexus 7), Serial Number and Inventory Number.

Than have a template sheet where every employee that borrows something gets to sign on a piece of paper indicating the hardware that is being borrowed, and have another sheet that is also signed upon the item being returned.

I think this should help you in avoiding any confusion that may result if you do not have a strucutured process in place.

Claymoore

Your employees don't have laptops and phones assigned to them, they have to share?

I have clients that use equipment mailboxes in Exchange. I know they've used them for cars, projectors, radios and the like but they should work fine for whatever equipment they need to check out.

Manage Equipment Mailboxes: Exchange 2013 Help

mufasa

sasnimrod wrote: »

I think it would be a good starting point to label each hardware asset with a unique inventory number. Depending on the amount of hardware that is being borrowed I would suggest that you store this in an Excel Sheet containing info such as the following: Hardware Name (e.g. Google Nexus 7), Serial Number and Inventory Number.

Than have a template sheet where every employee that borrows something gets to sign on a piece of paper indicating the hardware that is being borrowed, and have another sheet that is also signed upon the item being returned.

I think this should help you in avoiding any confusion that may result if you do not have a strucutured process in place.

if i cant find anything with physical paperwork then i'll be going down this route. thanks

Claymoore wrote: »

Your employees don't have laptops and phones assigned to them, they have to share?

no they dont share, we have a pool of 10 laptops for staff to use should they forget a laptop at home,loose it or 'break' it, we also get temps over busiest periods.
as well as laptops we also have Mitel teleworker phones, projectors and expensive lync headsets that seam to always go walkies

MrJimbo19

You bring up an interesting question. At one of the offices I work at the HR department handles checking equipment out to people when they initially onboard but if something is swapped or needs to be changed out (upgraded) then they email me the request and I get it ready if it is not on standby. I use a basic access db to collect the data that I found on the MS website under templates. You setup users and then equipment and can break things out by dept and cost. It came in handy when I had to show which dept was using signifcantly more equipment but not covering anything in terms of IT budget for me.

Whatever you decide to do, its a smart move to track the equipment. Before I was tracking the issued stuff they were using the old "now what did I issue you?" method when employees were quitting or being terminated. It was very costly to keep replacing phones especially.

Here is a link to the form that I use Asset tracking database - Templates

Hope it helps, good luck

--chris--

Good replies, I considered asset management to be a keystone of the larger organization but wished smaller companies were able to implement it. I have a few friends with small business's that could benefit from this stuff!

Qord

We use Lansweeper for inventory management, and anyone who's going to have an item for any length of time is noted in the inventory. For short term things (like a weekend loaner for a conference) we just make them submit a ticket. Ticket gets closed when the item gets returned.

Lansweeper is free, as is Spceworks. Both are pretty good network inventory tools, and both allow you to manually add items that can't be inventoried automatically.

EngRob

If excel gets to be a little too manual then you could try a tool that i've used in the past with a couple of barcode scanners. In the past I implemented WASP mobile asset management quite easily and fairly inexpensive.

We would just scan the barcode of equipment and then check-in/check-out/move as necessary. Tracking loaned equipment was quite easy with their built in reports, just run a report of all equipment currently checked-out.