Tracking and Managing IT Devices

Benefits

With IT devices such as laptops, tablets, etc, assigned to many different stations and custodians across your organization, Ventipix Asset & Inventory Manager platform enables you to track their usage effortlessly and accurately. 

By tracking device usage, you’ll get insight into the entire life cycle management of your IT devices enabling you to make strategic device procurement.

You can easily track which devices are checked out and checked in, discover which devices are in for maintenance or disposal, and see who has received devices in the past.

Getting Started

What you will need

Barcodes or NFC tags

If your devices have existing barcodes, as long as they are unique for each device, you can use them to identify the assets.

If you don’t have any barcodes or NFC tags, you can generate and print barcodes, or program the NFC tags.

Note:

• if you plan to scan barcodes with our iOS or Android app, be sure that they are in a supported format.
• with NFC tags, you can either use its serial ID or program it with your own unique values.

The Smartphone App

Download the iOS or Android app that will help you to scan barcodes, QR codes, or NFC tags. In addition, you will also be able to fill in and submit data pertaining to the asset being scanned.

You will need to create user accounts for those who should use the smartphone app, and also grant permissions to relevant sections or features of the app.

Note – although the smartphone app is recommended, you can use a webcam or Bluetooth/USB scanners to scan barcodes.

Using the asset management features

Asset Tagging

The first step is to let the platform know what the devices are. Details can include attributes such as the device’s name, brand, purchase date, location, costs, images, etc. These attributes are customizable, so you can capture any attribute that you want.

There are several ways to add your devices’ records to the platform. They include form filling from either the web browser or the smartphone app, CSV import, and automation from Zapier or Microsoft Power Automate.

The quickest way to get started is by importing the device records from a CSV spreadsheet.

Asset Checkout

Once you have tagged the devices, you can then check them out to custodians and capture relevant data when doing so. 

These captured details can be viewed on the Asset Checkout page.

If the usage demand is higher for some of the devices, you can use the asset reservation feature to schedule their usage.

You can optionally enable checkout receipts emails to be issued to custodians, or other stakeholders, whenever a checkout is done. The receipts include a list of items that the stakeholder is responsible for.

If you need to capture the custodians’ details, there are a number of custom field options available for doing so, e.g basic dropdowns. For a large set of custodians, you can use autocomplete dropdowns. If badges are available, you can use the CSV search feature which supports barcode/NFC tag scanning.

Asset Check-in

When devices are returned, simply check them in for the platform to update their status.

You can set up email reminders to remind custodians of devices that are due for return or overdue.

Asset Reservation

You can specify what assets are unavailable on a specific day and time.

Reserved assets cannot be checked out.

Asset Maintainance

If devices need maintenance services, details such as notes on what’s broken, supporting images, etc, can be captured.

These details can be viewed on the Asset Maintenance page.

Asset Auditing

With the asset auditing feature, you can account for all the devices that are present and in active use.

What next?

As you track the movement and usage of the devices, the Tagged Assets section of the platform will show a current up-to-date overview of all the devices’ statuses.

You can change how the data gets formatted and presented on the table or what gets displayed on it, group alike records, search for records, export them, format them, change the behavior of some functionalities, set up various notifications, sync with other platforms e.g. Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, and generate custom reports.

If you’re part of a team, you can add other team members as sub-users and assign them permission to access certain features.