By working with their State Government and Google, the Plano Independent School District launched a 1 to 1 initiative that provided Chromebook laptops to all its students. This presented a challenge when deploying and auditing this large number of assets. The Plano Independent School District's IT Department needed to be able to receive these new assets, get them tagged and listed in their system, before deploying throughout the district. They also needed to be able to audit these assets for future reporting. The audit reporting feature is crucial and necessary for their auditors during their annual asset review.
The InnovationBy integrating asset scanning devices with SherpaDesk's PSA & Asset Management feature, Plano Independent School District IT techs can now deploy assets and audit an entire classroom with a single handheld barcode scanning device. This reduces inspection time per class to mere seconds, hence decreasing their overall audit time from weeks to days.
Time SavingsThis represents a huge time saving when the system is used to audit a large number of assets. According to the calculations done by the Plano Independent School District, they are now saving approximately seven hours per 1500 assets. For example, if someone needs to audit 30,000 assets, they would now be saving 140 hours or 17.5 working days (that's over 3 weeks!)
The time savings introduced by this technology benefit not only the Plano Independent School District IT Department but also its internal auditors in charge of tracking state-sponsored school assets (like the ones in the Chromebook initiative).
An additional benefit for auditors is the seamless integration between SherpaDesk's Asset Management feature and their own workflows, enabling them to track and detect any missing piece of hardware or the status of any assigned Chromebook (IT Tickets, location, whom it’s assigned to, etc.).
The Plano Independent School District has seen asset deployment and auditing times decrease immensely. Asset scanning now takes seconds, enabling overall audit times to be reduced from weeks to days. To facilitate compliance, the Plano Independent School District has granted the state auditor access to all of their asset’s information. This enables state auditors to seamlessly pull reports and get the most accurate and up to date information on any given group of assets. Other Areas of improvement the Plano ISD has seen are:
● Support Services
● Customer Satisfaction
● Accountability
● Reporting
● Process Improvements
● Asset Tracking and Management
● Notifications and Communications
● Project Management and Task Tracking
The IT team uploads their hardware assets into SherpaDesk's Asset Manager.
Each piece of hardware gets barcode scanned via the integrated handheld device and assigned a physical location (classroom number etc.).
To run an asset audit, techs are now able to go to each classroom (or office) and automatically pull up a list of the assets assigned to that particular room via a barcode scan using a hand held device.
Once the handheld device scans a room, it will determine if all the assets assigned to that room are still in place. Any missing items will go into a missing queue. The status of the missing hardware will remain set to missing until it gets scanned during the course of an audit. If the asset never gets picked up in any future audits, techs can then review the asset logs to determine where the asset was last located (i.e., the last audit date, who the asset was checked out to, last known service, etc.)
Using a bar-code scanning mobile solution integrated seamlessly with SherpaDesk, users can now add, move, retire and check IN/OUT assets in seconds.
Having the basic understanding of how our support structure needed to work allowed the SherpaDesk team to configure the system to meet our needs easily.
Coordinator of Help Desk & Technology Security
To find out how the SherpaDesk Asset Management feature & asset tracking integration has helped improve their hardware auditing processes, we spoke to Randi Weaver, Coordinator of Help Desk & Technology Security for the Plano Independent School District.
SherpaDesk: Hi Randi. What was it like before your district started using SherpaDesk?
Randi Weaver: It was unorganized, making it very time consuming when we needed to make updates or implement new changes in our legacy system. The old solution made it difficult to do easy things like add custom fields or new data values. Our school district is always changing, and our existing system just wasn’t flexible enough to keep up with the changing demands.
SherpaDesk: What departmental level problems were you trying to solve with SherpaDesk?
Randi Weaver: Inventory concerns and making changes on the fly. We used to have a very disjointed support system. Our assets (hardware) were not tied to our IT support system. We didn’t have any historical data on support, the location of assets, audit history, etc. Due to pressing audit needs mandated by the state auditors (they needed to have more visibility and access to see where assets were being used and located) we decided to switch to SherpaDesk because it offered a one-stop solution for our multiple issues.
