Asset Management overview

BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management reduces the total cost of ownership of items represented by your CIs and increases return on investment. The BMC Helix ITSM integrates BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management, with BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management, and BMC Service Level Management. In addition, you can support customized business processes by using BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management.

Related topics

Managing-software-licenses

Using-the-configuration-catalog

BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management provides the following features to reduce the total cost of ownership of your CIs and increase return on investment:

Feature	Description
Software license management	Reduces software license overspending and non-compliance through greater accuracy in discovering, tracking, and reallocating software licenses. By automatically linking discovered software configuration items to software license certificates, BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management can report on license compliance and facilitate license reallocation.
Contract management	Tracks the status, type, terms, conditions, payments, and other information about lease, software, warranty, and maintenance contracts
Blackout schedules	Lists available or unavailable time for CIs
Inventory management	Specifies, tracks, and manages individual CIs and bulk items.
Configuration management	Defines standard configurations, or setups, for different people or groups within a company, and maintains the status of the CIs within the configurations
Lifecycle IT CI management	Uses best practices workflow to handle all phases of the IT CI management lifecycle from requisition, purchase, and receipt, to installation and deployment
Cost module	Consolidates CI costs from procurement to disposition, and allocates and tracks costs to cost centers
Requisition management	Creates purchase requisitions, manages the approvals of the requisitions, initiates the creation of purchase orders, and manages the receipt of items from suppliers and the creation of the associated CIs

Software asset management

Organizations can acquire software in different ways. Software can be built for a specific purpose within the company. Software can be purchased from a software vendor or outsourcer. Software can be acquired through an acquisition or merger between companies, or between departments within a single company.

Software asset management is a core component of an overall asset management policy. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) in the Software Asset Management Book defines software asset management as "all of the infrastructure and processes necessary for the effective management, control and protection of the software assets within an organization, throughout all stages of their lifecycle."

ITIL indicates that the following processes make up the holistic approach to software asset management:

Overall management processes — The management processes surrounding the other software assets management processes. The overall management processes are related to change management.
Core asset management processes — Identification of software assets, including maintaining this information in BMC Helix CMDB.
Logistic processes — Control of the software asset lifecycle. These processes include procurement, deployment, and end of life.
Verification and compliance processes — Verification and compliance of software asset management policies and procedures, including license compliance.
Relationship management processes — Software contract management.

Standard configuration

The standard configurations define what type of software or hardware a particular group is entitled to. The configurations are stored in the Configuration form. This form has a header component that describes the configuration and a line item component that describes each of the components (hardware or software) that make up this standard configuration.

The Standard configurations functionality is integrated with the BMC Change Management application to facilitate the procurement process. The standard configuration compares what is available in the inventory to determine which items are available and which items need to be procured.

Configuration management

In BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management, Configuration Management consists of processes that ensure CIs are available when BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management requires CIs. If CIs are not available, request new CIs. For acquiring new CIs, you can create new or use existing contracts with the suppliers. Configuration management also consists of processes to ensure that the supplier and the contract information is updated.

The following figure shows the configuration management process flow:

configuration management process.png

Sequence	Process	Reference
CI Requisition	Configuration administrators, purchasing agents, and approvers order new CIs.	Creating-and-managing-purchase-requisitions
2. Supplier Information Maintenance	Configuration administrators register new suppliers or update the contact details of the existing suppliers.	Adding-contact-information
3. CI Registration	Configuration administrators and purchasing agents register when they create new CIs.	Creating-CIs
4. CI Update	Configuration administrators update the attributes or relations of the existing CIs.	Modifying-records
5. Contract Administration	Configuration administrator when they create new contracts or update the existing contracts.	Managing-contracts

Configuration catalog

Use the configuration catalog in BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management to set up and manage approved configurations in your company.

Production dataset

Production dataset is the central data source referenced by the entire IT environment. In BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management, BMC.Assets is the production dataset that stores the information about all the configuration items (CIs). For more information about dataset, see CMDB Orientation.

Quick tour of Asset management

You can watch the following video for a quick tour of Asset management:

https://youtu.be/-AFPAGu51dE

Role-based console

Depending on your role, you might have access to one or more of the consoles listed in the following table. You can access these consoles from the navigation pane of the BMC Remedy AR System IT Home page.

Console	Used by	Purpose	More information
Purchasing	Configuration administrators Purchasing agents	Create purchase requisitions Place purchase orders Price purchase requisitions Access approval console Run reports	Creating-and-managing-purchase-requisitions
Approval	Anyone with permission to approve a purchase requisition Important: This console is also used by BMC Change Management.	Approve or reject purchase requests If BMC Change Management is installed, approve or reject change requests Access Approval Central View or create reminders	Creating-and-managing-purchase-requisitions
Receiving	Configuration administrators	Receive and return items from suppliers View purchase orders	Creating-and-managing-purchase-requisitions
Contract Management	Contract managers	Create and manage contracts	Managing-contracts
Software Asset Management	Software asset managers	View software license compliance Manage software license certificates Manage jobs that automatically attach CIs to license certificates	Managing-software-licenses

Reports

BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management provides various predefined reports to give you quick and easy access to information about your system. Use the Report console to generate these reports. If the predefined reports return more information than you need, you can manage the scope of the report by using qualifications. For more information, see Using-reports-and-flashboards.

Where to go from here

Architecture

Key-concepts