What is Hardware Asset Management (HAM)?

Hardware assets are difficult to manage manually from the moment they are purchased to the time they are disposed of. Hardware assets can be expensive to provision, configure, maintain, and secure. They also require significant management effort and depreciate rapidly. To create effective and successful IT infrastructure management, an organization needs specialized software that helps streamline the entire process for hardware asset management.

Definition Of Hardware Asset Management

Hardware asset management is the process of monitoring, managing and evaluating assets. HAM covers the management of computers, printers, monitors, servers, phones, switches, routers and more throughout their lifecycle. It aims to manage assets yields in some way, from the procurement of products to their disposal. With the hardware asset management process, the hardware asset provides real-time details of inventories, a bird's eye view of the asset lifecycle, and an overview of how assets are used in organizations.

Hardware assets in IT service management refer to assets that are tangible in nature that you can touch and feel, such as desktops, laptops, servers. Hardware assets include those in storage as well as those in use.

Hardware asset management is a critical part of IT asset management that must be aligned with the overall scope of the organization and aligned with other ITIL processes.

What are the Benefits of Hardware Asset Management?

The core principles of Hardware Asset Management are to control costs, limit over-purchases, have complete insight into IT inventory, and always be audit-ready. This provides many benefits for the organization.

Saves costs:

Properly managing hardware assets throughout their lifecycle helps save costs by reducing the chances of failure as the assets are properly serviced and maintained. However, disposing of an asset when it reaches the end of its life cycle helps save on high maintenance costs.

Improves asset acquisition and use:

HAM helps get the most out of the organization's inventory by leveraging underutilized assets with hardware asset management. Gaining full insights into inventory and understanding what's available provides the ability to pull inventory from existing stocks instead of making budget-impacting purchases.

Increases security and compliance:

With hardware asset management, you get a comprehensive and precise view of hardware assets that can help you identify assets that need to be maintained or that are nearing retirement, allowing them to be repaired or disposed of before they become a security threat to the organization. Monitoring asset inventory helps detect assets that comply with the organization's policies. This not only quickly isolates security vulnerabilities but also aids in compliance auditing.

Strengthens control over IT inventory:

HAM helps better understand hardware assets to provide transparency and better control over IT inventory. It allows to verify hardware inventory information is in the right place using ITAM features such as asset discovery and request validation.

Prevents asset theft:

Asset tagging, allocating and withdrawing ownership, location tracking, and routine maintenance are core parts of hardware asset management. Hardware asset management enables you to accurately track and document information such as hardware warranty details, license renewal and compliance, and maintenance status to reduce risks and prevent theft.

Increases efficiency:

With hardware asset management, IT teams can focus on the business that generates more value by automating redundant and inefficient processes. Monitoring hardware inventory helps identify asset issues before they occur and prevents delays and disruptions to operations.

Hardware Lifecycle Management

Hardware assets, no matter how big or small, expensive or cheap, have a complex life that goes through 5 main stages.

1- Procurement:

It involves purchasing the asset to meet both the company's requirements and the budget. This step includes creating the purchase order, starting the predetermined purchase order workflow, associating the budgets with the cost centers, obtaining the approvals for the purchase order, adding the purchased assets to the IT inventory.

2- Deployment:

The asset is deployed at this stage. Preliminary checks are performed to evaluate physical defects, engineering issues, design issues, and whether the asset has been properly and safely installed. This stage includes activities to deploy assets, change from stock to availability, assign software to hardware asset, and pairwise mapping. After these steps, the asset is used to meet the requirements for which it was purchased.

3- Maintenance:

Due to the possibility of wear and tear and also continuous use of an asset, asset protection is an extremely important issue. Maintenance is done to protect the asset. This stage includes scheduling scans, obtaining audit history and full ownership tracking, software compatibility, calculating asset depreciation, and determining the total cost of ownership of the asset.

4- Support:

Maintenance and support help prolong the productive life of an asset despite its increasing age. This phase includes contract maintenance for assets, notifications to technicians about the expiration date, dependency mapping in the CMDB to identify the impact, software license agreements and management. Changes and updates are made to keep the asset up to date during the support phase, which increases productivity in terms of overall IT efficiency.

Retirement & Disposal:

Assets should be disposed of at the end of their useful and productive life. Before assets are disposed of, relationships are reviewed and processed in a way that does not affect the organization or environment, and critical information is removed. It is then disassembled piece by piece, and the reusable parts are preserved. If the asset contains any component that may pose an environmental threat, it is classified as dangerous and removed.

Hardware Asset Management Software

Hardware Asset Management Software is a solution developed for more effective execution of HAM processes. Loggle, an IT Asset Management software, offers a Hardware Asset Management Tool where businesses can holistically manage all their hardware inventories.

Some functions of a HAM Tool

• Hardware Asset Tracking
• Hardware Asset Lifecycle Management
• Hardware Cost Measurement
• Maintenance Notifications
• Warranty Management

Hardware Asset Management Jobs

Hardware asset management job is a profession that is hired all over the world. It is basically an employee who keeps the track of the hardware assets of his company. The job requires him to be a detail-oriented person and must have good knowledge about computers and other related things.

The hardware asset management jobs are very popular in many companies because they help them to keep their data safe and secure from any kind of loss or damage.

Hardware Asset Management Job Description

The main purpose of the hardware asset management job description is to take care of all kinds of hardware assets like computers, printers, scanners etc. The employee has to make sure that these assets are properly maintained by replacing them when needed. He also needs to make sure that there is no damage done to these assets like breakage or any other kind of damage which can lead to loss or damage in the future as well as infect other devices with virus etc.

The main tasks of a hardware asset manager are:

• Ensuring that all hardware assets are working properly
• Making sure that all assets are up to date with their latest software updates
• Keeping track of the assets' locations
• Maintaining records of the assets' history