Physical Asset Tags and Serial Numbers
This question may be to low level for this forum. Sorry about that.
I've been asked to look into what would be needed to tag our IT assets with a label that has a tag number and our support number. The project lead wants to use the equipment's serial number as the actual tag number, because "The reason we’re considering using the machine’s serial number as the asset tag is that, if we do, KACE will be able to handle it much easier; the serial number is already the machine’s “primary key†in KACE"
I disagree. I think a pre-printed label with a sequential number would be much more durable and secure, and could just as easily be used to pull up a machine's record. Doing it the leads way would involve the field teams printing labels on the fly as they do an inventory of each office.
I was wondering how KACE users actually tagged their physical inventory, and what solutions they used to do it.
I've been asked to look into what would be needed to tag our IT assets with a label that has a tag number and our support number. The project lead wants to use the equipment's serial number as the actual tag number, because "The reason we’re considering using the machine’s serial number as the asset tag is that, if we do, KACE will be able to handle it much easier; the serial number is already the machine’s “primary key†in KACE"
I disagree. I think a pre-printed label with a sequential number would be much more durable and secure, and could just as easily be used to pull up a machine's record. Doing it the leads way would involve the field teams printing labels on the fly as they do an inventory of each office.
I was wondering how KACE users actually tagged their physical inventory, and what solutions they used to do it.
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Posted by:
cmccracken
14 years ago
Hey Jerry,
We already owned a help desk/asset management system before purchasing the KBOX. We essentially selected the path you are suggesting. We created an 8 digit tag scheme to cover all of our assets for both IT and other departments. Each department was assigned a digit for the first part of the tag; so water asset tags all start with 1, sewer asset tags all start with 2, IT with 3, etc. The remaining 7 digits were divided up by the department as they saw fit. So with the IT tags, I used the next digit to indicate the asset type, ex. 1 for computers, 2 for monitors, 3 for printers, etc. The next three digits are a sequential number to uniquely identify the asset, ex. my computer was the 92nd computer I inventoried, so it was 092. The last three digits were used for child assets, typically software. The full tag for my PC ended up as 31092000. I didn't include any digits for a location because I expected PCs to be moved, and I didn't want to have to retag them. Label wise, I just use mailing labels that I print from Word using a barcode font so I could inventory them with a reader if I wanted to, and so they look more "official". I also name my PCs with their tag number, so if a user calls, I can just ask for the tag number, and I can find them in both our asset manager and KBOX in an instant.
If my description left anything out, please let me know and I'll take another swing at it.
Casey
We already owned a help desk/asset management system before purchasing the KBOX. We essentially selected the path you are suggesting. We created an 8 digit tag scheme to cover all of our assets for both IT and other departments. Each department was assigned a digit for the first part of the tag; so water asset tags all start with 1, sewer asset tags all start with 2, IT with 3, etc. The remaining 7 digits were divided up by the department as they saw fit. So with the IT tags, I used the next digit to indicate the asset type, ex. 1 for computers, 2 for monitors, 3 for printers, etc. The next three digits are a sequential number to uniquely identify the asset, ex. my computer was the 92nd computer I inventoried, so it was 092. The last three digits were used for child assets, typically software. The full tag for my PC ended up as 31092000. I didn't include any digits for a location because I expected PCs to be moved, and I didn't want to have to retag them. Label wise, I just use mailing labels that I print from Word using a barcode font so I could inventory them with a reader if I wanted to, and so they look more "official". I also name my PCs with their tag number, so if a user calls, I can just ask for the tag number, and I can find them in both our asset manager and KBOX in an instant.
If my description left anything out, please let me know and I'll take another swing at it.
Casey
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