An Introduction to Hardware Asset Management

This blog provides an overview of using hardware asset management with ServiceNow to manage your hardware assets

The hardware asset management or ham provides prescriptive and automated features to increase your asset data accuracy throughout the asset lifecycle with ham, it's important to know what assets do you own where are they located, and finally, are you using what you have so you can maximize your investment in these assets.

HAM on the now platform can help you answer these questions by providing visibility into your hardware assets throughout their lifecycle with ham, you can know and control your assets to enable better decisions and optimize your asset investments to deliver better i.t services mitigate risk and increase the visibility of it assets enforce asset policies and regulatory requirements and reduce asset costs and automate asset lifecycle processes to minimize wasted resources and eliminate repetitive tasks

First, you need to know what hardware you have that's where hardware model normalization comes in hardware inventory data usually comes from multiple sources and they're not always consistent but each hardware item has a unique model number and ServiceNow hardware model normalization uses this number to normalize records with inconsistent product names and manufacturers it aligns them under one common display name that combines the product name manufacturer and model number this process of normalization aligns the values in the database with those in the unspsc which provides the global standard for product recognition let's look at this example on the platform.

we can see that this hardware model the record has been normalized and that the display name is a combination of the manufacturer product and model fields data is normalized via the hardware model normalization content service this content library is stored within your instance and is updated on a weekly the basis from the ServiceNow content team in the hardware model lifecycles tab we populate manufacturer lifecycle dates such as end of sale end of support end of extended support and end of life with this information you can proactively strategize hardware refreshes by having sufficient time to plan and negotiate costs for those replacements now that we have accuracy at the model level with asset normalization let's look at how we automate lifecycle management for individual assets flows are prescriptive flows built for a specific asset process ServiceNow provides workflows in the base system that you can run to automate bulk stock orders hardware disposal and hardware requests you access these flows in flow designer add personnel assignments and they're ready to run