Asset Management

User Guide: Asset Mgmt. Locations & Organizations

The first step when creating Organizations and Locations is to decide on the hierarchy. Think from largest to smallest.

Locations

For locations you can use some of these: Region, Country, County or Province, State, City, Campus, Building, Floor, Room or Data Center or Conf. Room

  1. If you have any other breakdown categories, you can place them where they fit.
  2. Then decide from an Asset Management perspective, which of the hierarchy levels you want to use to track your assets
  3. Take the levels you plan to use and place a “-“ between them.

For this example I am going to use: Region, State, City, Building

Region-State-City-Building (This is now your hierarchy for the locations)

For each level you plan to use, come up with a naming convention for each.  Preferably an abbreviation or short name that is easy to understand. But do  not make everything an abbreviation as it may be difficult to understand what they all mean. Use abbreviations for levels that all can understand like state or region. You can also try spelling them all out, then deciding what to abbreviate.

  • Region:
    • NW-Northwest
    • SW-Southwest
    • MW-Midwest
    • EC-East Coast
  • State:
    • State Abbreviations
  • City:
    • LA-Los Angeles
    • MIA-Miami
    • KC-Kansas City
    • SEA-Seattle
  • Building:
    • Bldg 2
    • Bldg 405
    • Bldg 5
    • Bldg 10

In an Excel spreadsheet, create all the levels you need.

You can also include levels that are not as detailed if some items do not need  all levels. (NW-WA-SEA)

  • NW-WA-SEA-Bldg 1
  • NW-WA-SEA-Bldg 2
  • NW-OR-PORT-Bldg 1
  • NW-OR-PORT-Bldg 3
  • SW-CA-LA-Bldg 106
  • SW-CA-SAN-Bldg 9

You can also include levels that are specific to certain groups of HW Assets or certain types of HW Assets. An example would be building in the extra level for conference room equipment (NW-WA-SEA-Bldg 1-Conf Rm A)  or for Network Equipment (NW-WA-SEA-Bldg 1-Data Center Rm 101). This way only conference room equipment and network equipment are tracked at a more granular level. Standard computers would stop at the default building number level. The "Bldg 9" level can also be replaced by a name your company uses for that building if the number does not make sense.

Enter the locations into the Asset Import Master Spreadsheet and import using the Asset Import App, or use the Asset Excel App.

This will enable you to easily sort and view using the filtering capability of  Service Manager, while only having to manage one field.

Organizations

For Organizations, follow similar steps.

Division-Department-Area

Many of the structures for location and organization have been defined by your company. It is just a matter defining the levels and creating naming conventions. If not, this is a good exercise to define them and communicate them to your co-workers. Remember, you probably do not want mimic your entire organization chart. Just use the levels that make sense from an Asset Management perspective.

Some companies decide there is no value at tracking organizations as Cost Centers already do this for them, however, they decide to use this as their Business Units. This is one field that has more flexibility in how you use, and can be used however it will provide value to your Asset Management team. 

Alternate Method for Locations and Organizations

The Location form has a field named Primary Location and the Organization form has a field named Parent Organization. With these fields you can either completely build a tiered structure or use it in combination with the single line method. The single line method as described above makes it easier to filter at multiple levels, but this is an option if you would like.