Welcome back to our four-part series on cutting IT costs in the asset life cycle. In our last blog, we discussed challenges with spending during the asset procurement stage and learned about valuable reports that can help. In this part, we’ll talk about asset deployment and look at more reports that can help cut costs during this stage of the asset life cycle.
Deployment is the second stage of the asset life cycle, when the purchased assets are assigned to employees or departments that need them. While this might seem like a straightforward phase, this is ironically the stage during which assets tend to spend a substantial amount of time in an idle or unused state.
This happens when organizations fail to balance supply and demand. When organizations over-procure assets, it can lead to an increase in supply without a real demand for it. This tends to needlessly drain the IT budget on unused assets, which could have otherwise been spent on other critical IT equipment.
An easy way to identify if your organization has a problem with over-supply is by looking for assets that spend too much time in an idle state without being assigned to any user or department.
On the flip side, not having enough assets in stock could also be detrimental. It could result in users having to wait long periods in order to accomplish important tasks, which hurts productivity. An asset wait period report can help highlight the amount of time users generally wait to receive the assets they requested.
Using the Assets in store for too long and the Asset wait period reports in tandem can help you maintain balance between supply and demand, ensuring you don’t over-procure assets or keep your users waiting for assets for long.
Tip: Using a monthly consumption report, you can get a good understanding of the number of assets consumed by users in various categories monthly, and compare that with the number of assets in stock. This can help you figure out how long the current stock will last and systematically plan purchases based on consumption.
These reports were built using Analytics Plus, ManageEngine’s IT analytics solution, which offers out-of-the-box integrations with several popular IT applications such as ServiceNow, Jira Software, Zendesk, and ManageEngine’s umbrella of IT products. If you’re looking for an IT analytics solution, start your free, 30-day trial of Analytics Plus now.
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Stay tuned for part three of the series in which we’ll dive into asset maintenance and support. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the comments section below.
