In my last full-time position I managed the asset tracking database for my employer. It was one of those things that “someone” needed to do, and it seemed that only way that “someone” wouldn’t equate to “no-one” was for me to do it – which was ok. We used Snipe IT [1] to track the assets. I don’t have enough experience with asset tracking to say that Snipe is better or worse than average, but it basically did the job. Asset serial numbers are stored, you can have asset types that allow you to just add one more of the particular item, purchase dates are stored which makes warranty tracking easier, and every asset is associated with a person or listed as available. While I can’t say that Snipe IT is better than other products I can say that it will do the job reasonably well.
One problem that I didn’t discover until way too late was the fact that the finance people weren’t tracking serial numbers and that some assets in the database had the same asset IDs as the finance department and some had different ones. The best advice I can give to anyone who gets involved with asset tracking is to immediately chat to finance about how they track things, you need to know if the same asset IDs are used and if serial numbers are tracked by finance. I was pleased to discover that my colleagues were all honourable people as there was no apparent evaporation of valuable assets even though there was little ability to discover who might have been the last person to use some of the assets.
One problem that I’ve seen at many places is treating small items like keyboards and mice as “assets”. I think that anything that is worth less than 1 hour’s pay at the minimum wage (the price of a typical PC keyboard or mouse) isn’t worth tracking, treat it as a disposable item. If you hire a programmer who requests an unusually expensive keyboard or mouse (as some do) it still won’t be a lot of money when compared to their salary. Some of the older keyboards and mice that companies have are nasty, months of people eating lunch over them leaves them greasy and sticky. I think that the best thing to do with the keyboards and mice is to give them away when people leave and when new people join the company buy new hardware for them. If a company can’t spend $25 on a new keyboard and mouse for each new employee then they either have a massive problem of staff turnover or a lack of priority on morale.