How School Districts Track Inventory, Reduce Loss, and Manage the Entire Asset Lifecycle

We check the devices in, make sure that they’re all good, and they’re on their way. It’s a bam-bam process. They’re there 60 seconds, 90 seconds at most.

With Asset Management, we have been able to keep track of all of our Chromebooks and other devices. That allowed us, when our last batch of Chromebooks was no longer supported, to actually change out all 2,000 of our Chromebooks in an orderly manner in about one day, which led to essentially no downtime for students.

The inventory piece for mobile devices is great because students can check in and check out their devices. You can have them sign in digitally, which is huge for us.

Every single one of the devices that we’ve gotten, we’ve been able to maintain our inventory, where in the past they would get scattered and nobody knew where they went.

Laptops have a tendency to start at one campus and then end up at another, so we use Asset Management to identify those devices and take them back to where they’re supposed to be.

That has been a game changer for us in keeping the devices where they should be and knowing where they are.

I think it has increased our accountability because with the Frontline system, it actually records who made the change, and a lot of times there’s a breadcrumb associated with each action.

The inventory piece is really very big. Looking at where we started, with not having an idea of the replenishment cycle to where we’re moving to now, it is really helping to keep the district’s spending under control, which is a huge piece… I’m able to pull out and see, ‘How many devices did we purchase last year? What was the cost?’ and know that within five years we’re going to have to replace them again. It helps us to have that roadmap.

We are able to pull up information with just a couple of clicks. Before, we would have had to go to a file cabinet and start digging through folders of purchase orders.

This is a perfect thing because you can designate your funding. It has the POs. Everything is linked together, so it is just a great product all around that met our needs.

There are times when they asked for that in the past and people were scrambling to figure out, ‘What did we purchase from this grant?’ I’m able to import it using that information, and then provide them serial, asset tag, costs, and all that stuff.

I have it set to notify the technicians when they get a new work order assigned to them. The automated workflow helps us a lot because there are only, like, 10 of us total.

Using [Help Desk and Asset Management] together increases productivity and significantly reduces the amount of loss our district would have had in the past.

If you’re looking at a device and you say, ‘This screen is broken,’ and you mark it as ‘In Repair,’ then it will automatically do the reverse and generate a Help Desk ticket.