10 Reasons Why You Should Consider Using IT Asset Management Tools

Increasingly, companies are implementing new technologies within their organizations.

Apart from accelerating specific processes and tasks and improving the entire company’s productivity, these assets require management.

Managing them all is quite time-consuming, not to mention challenging when there is more than one location or a large company.

A lack of proper asset management can lead to costs, disorganization, malfunctions, and a decline in productivity and efficiency.

The development of new technologies has fortunately led to new tools to automate the management of IT assets.

Keep reading if you think it might be of interest to you. In this article, we will list ten reasons you should consider using IT asset management tools.

Let’s get right to the point.

What is IT asset management?

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Essentially, IT asset management (ITAM) ensures that each of your organization’s assets is tracked, deployed, maintained, upgraded, and disposed of.

Simply, it is the process of ensuring that the valuable items in your organization, tangible and intangible, are tracked and used accordingly.

IT asset management – factors to consider

There are several important factors to be considered when managing assets:

• Monitoring and auditing assets – IT asset management involves auditing assets to ensure they are being used efficiently and comply with company policy and regulations.

• Manage software assets and licenses – Updating and tracking licenses can be a hassle if your business uses several software programs. The management of IT assets also includes ensuring that all licensing regulations are met, and that software is updated.

What is asset management software or tool?

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Asset management software or tools record and track an asset throughout its life cycle, from its acquisition through disposal.

Simply put, it’s a system that allows your company to track important details about its assets in real-time. This information available at your fingertips will decrease administrative costs, improve service, and give you greater visibility into asset usage, costs, and maintenance.

10 Benefits of using IT asset management tools

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You now know what asset management is and how to use software or tools related to it. The next step is to look at all the benefits you can gain through their use.

In this section, you’ll see a list of the top and most relevant ten reasons.

• Centralizing information

A primary reason why you should use IT asset management tools is that they allow you to centralize all the information.

When your company has multiple locations in different cities, tracking all your company’s assets can be a challenge, as can renewals and obsolescence.

Instead, tools make it easier to have everything in one place. Therefore, you can get a comprehensive overview of all costs, future expenses, etc.

• Linking departments together

Different departments within your business may use other assets to complete their tasks.

Manually managing assets throughout all departments can make it difficult for teams across different areas to keep track of them correctly and take up a lot of time.

However, asset management software enables you to centralize all the information from multiple locations and departments, so you’ll have a clear picture of your assets, licenses, maintenance, etc.

• Consistent service with the help of automation

You and your team may find it challenging and time-consuming to keep track of all the assets manually. So, accounting eats up a lot of valuable time that could be used for other more urgent tasks.

Contrary to this, today’s IT asset management tools rely heavily on artificial intelligence and machine learning, which enable the automation of repetitive tasks.

Therefore, you and your team will be able to save the time and energy that you would otherwise spend performing such tasks.

• Management of licenses to save money

Organizations buy or subscribe to several different software licenses over time. Smaller businesses may be able to monitor these licenses more easily. Larger businesses, however, are at greater risk of scattered IT expenditures, duplicated licenses, under-licensing, and wasting money on forgotten licenses. 

Whether large or small your organization may be, it is still subject to these consequences if it does not implement an effective strategy.

An asset management software can help you keep track of all the active licenses, renew them on time, suspend those you no longer require, and avoid duplicate permits. As a result, you will be able to save money.

• Reducing overspending on assets via IT asset inventory

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Keeping track of each IT asset inventory and all expenditures becomes difficult without a centralized system that gives an overview of all IT assets within your organization and those in other locations. 

Furthermore, if done manually, it can take a long time.

When you cannot do so, it can lead to you paying for assets you’re probably not even using anymore.

Instead, a comprehensive IT asset management system gives you a complete and clear view of your IT asset inventory, which is accessible and consultable at any time.

You can therefore identify unnecessary costs immediately and eliminate them.

• Avoiding penalty fees by ensuring compliance

Using IT asset management tools makes it easier for companies to comply with their external and internal compliance policies.

With IT asset management tools, you can generate reports that make monitoring compliance easier for you and your auditors.

Software license compliance, Service Level Compliance for customers (In some industries, service level agreements require the agreed service levels to be maintained/validated), Tax Compliance, PAS55 Compliance (Asset Management Compliance), Health and Safety are some examples of external compliance policies.

Internal compliance mainly includes Service Compliance and Usage Compliance.

• Reducing the error rate

By handling all assets manually within your organization, you have a very high chance of committing errors. Errors of this kind can be costly to your company, and they might affect its financial status in the long run.

As opposed to this, many IT asset management tools use artificial intelligence, which reduces error rates to almost zero.

• Planning maintenance more efficiently

As a means of guaranteeing correct continuity for your business, assets must be able to function properly at all times. Because of this, it is important to run maintenance procedures periodically.

A key benefit of asset management tools is establishing an efficient maintenance schedule. Using them, you can ensure that your assets are kept in optimal working condition for as long as possible.

Using them can identify problems with assets before they become more serious, resulting in a higher cost of repair.

Furthermore, you’ll be able to significantly decrease downtime of vital equipment and machinery and extend the life of assets.

• Getting rid of spreadsheets and whiteboards

When performing IT asset management manually, many organizations use spreadsheets to track data relating to their assets.

However, worksheets have proven inadequate in most cases. They are prone to errors, are difficult to share between teams, and lack technology to automate some tasks, making the process more difficult.

Because of its lack of features, the inability to track assets in real-time, and the limitations imposed by cloud-based systems, IT asset management tools represent a better long-term business strategy.

• Facilitating audit process

Every once in a while, you should perform an audit. However, when you use the manual method to record company assets, you can imagine how difficult it is to conduct an audit.

Manually recording assets presents several obstacles during the audit process. One of them is a discrepancy between the assets record in the document and the number of assets that exist in the organization or vice versa. There are assets in the organization, but they do not appear in your paper.

Alternatively, IT asset management software or tools make auditing processes seamless. They monitor your assets daily, including their acquisition, renewal, and licensing. Due to this, you can find all the information you need in one place and only have to consult them.

Conclusions

Every business needs to manage its IT assets to remain compliant and optimize costs and utilization.

However, performing this task can be pretty challenging and take a lot of time, preventing it from performing more critical and urgent tasks.

As listed in this article, those and other reasons illustrate why using IT asset management tools is advantageous.

Using them in your organization will streamline the management process and reduce the required costs and time.

Thank you for reading this blog post. Hopefully, you found it informative and helpful.

If you want to read more, check out this article on the top 6 tools you need to consider for your business.

Author

Flavia Silipo is a skilled SEO copywriter and digital marketing specialist with over two years of experience. You can find her on LinkedIn.