ITSM for high-velocity teams
Maximize efficiency with asset tracking
Your business relies on a range of physical assets, from computers and servers to equipment machinery and vehicles. Depending on your specific business, your critical assets may also include livestock, crops, or people. Whatever assets your business relies upon, you always need to be able to know what they are and where they are. You need asset tracking.
Businesses constantly select, acquire, deploy, manage, and reassign or retire assets. Tracking your company’s most valuable and important holdings is crucial. Success requires comprehensive, consistent, and effective asset tracking.
This guide will explore asset tracking, including how to choose the right asset tracking solution for your business and glimpses into the future of asset tracking and management. It also highlights how Jira Service Management can aid and improve asset tracking for service management at your company.
What is asset tracking?
Asset tracking is a method through which businesses maintain precise knowledge of the whereabouts, usage, and user attribution of valuable items. Asset tracking, also known as asset management, accounts for every resource that matters to your company. This includes acquisition and deployment through maintenance, updates, and disposal.
IT asset management (ITAM) is asset tracking focused on computing hardware, software, and related resources, including intangible items such as contracts and maintenance and service agreements. The criticality of your IT environment means ITAM represents a significant need for—and investment in—effective processes and tools. Anything valuable to your company is an asset that requires management and tracking.
Jira Service Management includes Assets, a native tool for asset and configuration management. Assets gives teams a flexible, dynamic way to track assets and configuration items (CI). Assets is highly flexible and can be configured to track everything from hardware, to licenses, to pianos.
Jira Service Management enables your teams to link asset and CI information to service requests, change requests, and in incident and problem management. Jira Service Management can help your business achieve and sustain IT asset management best practices and improve your service management practices.
Benefits of asset tracking
Effective asset tracking can deliver significant benefits to your company. Comprehensive asset tracking and management improves asset utilization, which contributes directly to increased operational efficiency and agility. Real-time asset tracking can also make your company more resistant to cyberattacks, equipment thefts, and attempted thefts of intellectual property.
ITAM can help your business maximize your IT assets and eliminate waste. By consolidating your IT asset information into a single source of truth, you can improve the productivity of your teams and your business. ITAM also supports compliance with frameworks such as ITIL, SOC 2, and ISO 27001.
Improved inventory management
The more valuable an asset is to your business, the more important it is to know where it is, who is using and managing it, and what it’s used for. An effective asset tracking system can help a company maintain accurate asset inventory records, which reduces human error and prevents loss or misplacement of assets.
Increased operational efficiency
Effective asset tracking software optimizes workflows, saves time, and streamlines processes. This helps optimize resource allocation, improving productivity across the company/.
Cost savings
Your business and IT management team are under constant pressure to do more while spending as little as possible. Effective asset tracking helps decrease costs by optimizing asset utilization and reducing or eliminating unnecessary purchases or rentals.
Enhanced security
Effective asset tracking can significantly improve cybersecurity and physical security at your business. Solid asset tracking processes help deter theft and unauthorized use. Asset tracking information can also aid in recovery from accidental or intentional loss or damage.
How to choose the right asset tracking system
When choosing asset tracking software for your business, focus on your business needs, challenges, and opportunities. Other important considerations include scalability, security, integration capabilities, available and needed skills, and your budget.
Jira Service Management can increase asset visibility, improve collaboration, and enhance flexibility for your business. Jira Service Management offers various features that make it an ideal asset tracking solution for service management:
- Automation: Automatically assign tickets to the responsible person or team. Alert relevant stakeholders about upcoming events, such as license renewals.
- Queries: Run queries on objects in Assets to conduct audits, manage costs, and identify the cause of issues.
- Discovery: Assets Discovery detects your IP-enabled assets and CIs, along with their key attributes and dependencies. Regularly running Discovery keeps asset information updated and tracks any changes.
What is asset tagging?
As asset tracking and management extend beyond IT, asset managers need new ways to label and identify multiple types of assets. Asset tagging allows teams to label objects in different ways. This includes printing QR codes and applying them to physical assets that lack serial numbers or other identifiers. Asset tagging can significantly increase the flexibility and reach of your asset tracking and management efforts.
Asset tracking across industries
Jira Service Management offers multiple features that can improve asset tracking for service management. The software’s asset tracking and management abilities benefit industries and teams beyond IT.
Manufacturers can use Jira Service Management to track raw materials. Legal teams can track and manage access to contracts, and intellectual property. Facility and fleet managers can use asset tracking and management to oversee buildings, offices, vehicles, and warehouses.
The future of asset management and tracking
The increasing use of IT tools in business is rapidly expanding the number and types of assets that need tracking and management. Artificial intelligence (AI) is exploding in business environments. AI technologies are being used to add new features to asset management solutions and to enable new ways to create content assets that need management. Worldwide financial shifts and uncertainty, rising material, ingredient, and people costs, and continuing supply chain issues compel businesses to scrutinize every cost and investment opportunity.
These trends are helping to shift the perception of asset management and tracking among business decision-makers. Historically seen as costly and complex, modern technologies make asset management and tracking easier. Today’s asset management solutions also have a keener focus on business needs and value.
Use Jira Service Management for asset tracking in service management
Jira Service Management can extend, enhance, and increase your asset management and tracking efforts. Jira Service Management includes Assets, a native asset and configuration management tool. Assets gives teams a flexible and dynamic way to track all kinds of assets and configuration items (CIs). Teams can easily link assets to service requests, incidents, problems, changes, and workloads.
Jira Assets also includes technologies from Atlassian Partner AirTrack that aggregate and consolidate IT management and operations data from multiple sources across a company. Use cases range from asset discovery and removal of out-of-date asset information to the verifications and attestations necessary to meet compliance requirements. Your business will benefit from future-ready asset management and tracking solutions and vendors.
Tracking asset information and attaching it to other management and tracking resources can help improve your service management efforts, including identifying and resolving issues. Jira Service Management helps your business deliver better service management and prepare for growth and change.
Asset tracking: Frequently asked questions
What is the best way to track assets?
Determine the assets you need to track based on business needs, goals, and available resources. Decide what information about those assets is most important to your business. Verify that your chosen asset tracking and management solutions can translate data into clear, actionable reports for all stakeholders and business decision-makers.
Jira Service Management takes a team-centric approach to asset management and tracking. The software enables teams to operate with speed and autonomy while ensuring their work efforts align with each other and business goals and don’t introduce risk to the business. These goals are much easier to achieve when delivery and operations teams are united on one platform and all assets and related issues are stored in one place.
What’s the difference between asset tracking and asset management?
Asset tracking is a subset of asset management. It refers to maintaining accurate, comprehensive, and timely information about critical assets across deployment life cycles. Asset management uses the data generated by asset tracking tools and processes to drive the best possible decisions. This includes asset acquisition, access management, configuration, deployment, integration, retirement, and other features.
What are asset tracking tools?
Multiple tools and technologies can track and manage assets. Barcodes, radio frequency identification tags, GPS technologies, and printable QR codes are some of the methods used to tag and identify physical and digital assets. Asset management and tracking software aggregates and consolidates tracking data. Then, it translates it into understandable, actionable information for businesses.
Effective processes are essential for deriving maximum business value from your asset management and tracking efforts. Jira Service Management can help you execute and enforce compliance with those practices, helping you achieve your asset management and tracking goals.
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Your step-by-step guide to asset and configuration management in Jira Service Management.
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Assets in Jira Service Management offers visibility into dependencies so you can manage assets and configuration items (CIs), quickly troubleshoot incidents, and minimize the risk of changes.
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