Asset Management begins by answering the simple question, “What do I have?” Activities include automated discovery, reconciliation and documentation of all telecom and network-attached assets, and assignment of unique tracking IDs, users, owners and locations to those assets.

MDSL’s 'Asset Management’ module relates to:

• All Telecom circuits and connections (eg. Wireless, Wire-line, Calling cards …)
  • Per type
  • Physical location
  • Logical location (eg. Department, division, cost centre…)
• Vendors and contract management
• Equipment (eg. routers, modem, PBX…)
• Maintenance and warranty contracts.

Lifecycle Control

With an inventory baseline in place, you will be ready to apply automated processes to control and capture cost, contract and usage information at different asset lifecycle phases.

Activities include relating existing inventory to purchases and leases, maintenance and warranty contracts, and maintenance and retirement schedules. Automated process workflows make these relationships dynamic, scalable and repeatable by automatically relating incoming assets and asset changes to the appropriate contracts, costs and schedules.

Portfolio Optimization

As automated processes capture more information over time, you will understand how IT assets can support business requirements better. You can combine asset inventory, cost, contract and general usage data with operational capacity, performance and resource utilization data to support server consolidation and capacity on demand initiatives. By understanding how asset supply differs from asset demand, you can optimize your asset portfolio to both cut costs and improve business service performance. You can also use total cost of ownership data and usage patterns to more accurately forecast IT budgets and negotiate with vendors.

Benefits

Value realized at this stage includes reallocation of idle assets (procurement savings), regulatory compliance and association of asset and cost.

For example in the wireless world, TEM automatically reports on the devices that need to be upgraded, or list of devices per country that are using 3G and the associated costs.

Value realized at this stage includes software license compliance; consolidated purchasing to high-volume contracts; reduced procurement by satisfying purchase requests from inventory; lease penalty avoidance; and greater service desk efficiency.