Learning about Asset Management

Smart IT is focused on a key set of capabilities to enable support staff to deal with assets as part of their work. These capabilities are receiving assets via mobile clients, creating, modifying and querying CI data, and inventory management.

Other asset management functionality, such as creating purchase requisitions and returning items, is still managed in BMC Helix ITSM from the classic Mid Tier interface. BMC Helix ITSM provides the capability to manage all aspects of an asset, including the lifecycle of the asset from purchase to disposal, contracts such as warranty, maintenance, support, software license management, and financial management.

If your organization has not opted in for the BMC Helix Innovation Studio based Asset console, you will see the classic Smart IT Asset console. 

For more information on how to enable the BMC Helix Innovation Studio based Asset console, see Enabling-and-configuring-the-Asset-console.

Basic concepts

As an asset administrator, you can can manage the lifecycle of any configuration item (CI) that you want to treat as an asset in the BMC Configuration Management Database (CMDB). You can populate asset data from multiple sources, such as Discovery tools, by manually creating the asset records, or receiving the assets. BMC Helix CMDB reconciliation and normalization procedures ensure that asset data is not duplicated in the database.

BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management supplements CI records in the BMC Helix CMDB with federated data about asset lifecycle management data and functionality. Federated data enables the BMC Helix CMDB and asset management tools to work closely. You can build your organization's asset data on the foundation of a completely reconciled and normalized production dataset of CI information, even when multiple data sources (like Discovery tools, or manual addition of records) are involved.

A dataset is a collection of assets and relationships for a given purpose. BMC Helix CMDB and BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management provide a control mechanism, the sandbox dataset. Separating the sandbox and production datasets can control how data is updated in BMC Helix CMDB, and also provides additional governance of the production dataset. If BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management is configured to use a sandbox dataset (for example, BMC.ASSET.SANDBOX) along with a production dataset (BMC ASSET), users do not make changes directly to the production data. When a user modifies data, the data flows through the sandbox dataset, and then through the Reconciliation Engine. The Reconciliation Engine determines which modified attributes should be modified in the production data. An administrator defines what sources of updates have the most appropriate (trusted) information to load into the production dataset. The administrator can also decide to disable the sandbox dataset.

Asset Management lifecycle

A typical asset follows a basic lifecycle in the system, which starts with a requisition and is managed till the asset is deployed and then retired from the system. The following capabilities support the Asset Management lifecycle:

• Manage the purchase process
• Create assets
• Receive assets
• Manage Inventory
• Perform bulk updates of assets

Manage the purchase process

You can use the BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management Requisition Console from Mid Tier to create requisitions for assets, submit them for approval, and generate purchase orders. For an overview of the purchasing process, see Requisition management.

Create assets

A user with Asset Admin permissions can directly create assets. For more information, see Creating-and-updating-assets-in-Smart-IT.

Receive assets

When an asset is delivered, you can update the status of each line item in the purchase order to Received. Smart IT provides the functionality to scan assets on delivery by using mobile devices. Users with sufficient Asset permissions and additional Receiving User permissions can receive assets in Smart IT.  When the status of all line items is Received, the purchase order is complete. For more information about receiving assets in Smart IT, see Scanning-assets-in-Smart-IT-using-mobile-devices.

Manage Inventory

Certain asset types are stored in the inventory, which is a CI type associated with a location. From the mobile application, you can scan an asset tag to move that item into or out of the inventory. From the universal client, you can search for an asset and move it into the inventory. When you move an asset into the inventory, you associate the asset record to the inventory record, and, in turn, with the location of the inventory. You can then deploy the asset at that location. You can also move the asset out of inventory, which basically dissociates the asset record from the inventory record. Users with sufficient Asset permissions can move assets into and out of the inventory in Smart IT. For more information about moving assets into the inventory by using Smart IT, see the Moving assets into inventory section in Running-asset-actions.

Perform bulk updates of assets

As an asset administrator, you can use the Asset Action feature to perform routine and repetitive tasks with just a few clicks. Administrators configure the asset actions needed for the organization in Smart IT. For example, an administrator might configure actions to enable asset administrators to set asset status or asset owner in bulk. The administrator can configure multiple asset actions, and you can run them whenever you receive assets from the Asset Console. For more information, see Configuring-asset-actions.

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Do you want to learn more?

For information about setting up a sandbox dataset, see Configuring Asset Management settings. 

For information about configuring reconciliation in Smart IT, see Configuring-the-reconciliation-method-for-assets.

For information about reconciliation status, see Viewing the reconciliation information of a CI.

Creating-and-updating-assets-in-Smart-IT provides additional information about how asset information is updated in the datasets when you create an asset.