3 Remote Working Challenges You Can Overcome With Smart Asset Management

In this post-pandemic age, the modern workplace has completely transformed as more office workers have increasingly performed their duties from home. This Upwork report predicts that 40.7 million US professionals will be fully remote by 2025.

While remote work brings many benefits to an organization, implementing this new process of working presents various asset management challenges to overcome. Find out more about them below:

Keeping Track of Assets And Their Usage

Tracking assets and their use in a traditional workplace setup is already challenging. Adding remote work to the mix magnifies that problem. When IT assets like laptops, tablets, and smartphones are shipped to thousands of locations, good luck tracking each movement without any error in spreadsheets.

Asset usage is another vital piece of data to track because it’s directly liked to IT security. Remote employees could accidentally access corporate networks over unsecured home or public internet connections using their equally unsecure devices.

According to this report by Malwarebytes Labs, 20% of the organizations who responded to their survey revealed that they faced security breaches due to remote work. Moreover, 24% of respondents to the same survey said they had to pay unexpected expenses to address the cybersecurity breach or malware attack.

Businesses have always needed to keep records of how many assets they’ve distributed and how they are used. The same thing applies to a remote working framework. Maybe even more so, as you have to account for remote locations instead of just the main offices.

The key to addressing this challenge is implementing an IT asset management system to manage and track assets and inventory. This system can provide real-time reports on locker occupancy, asset location, and the user’s behavior, giving administrators a bird’s eye view of how a smart locker and the assets are utilized. With this highly accurate data, decision-makers can optimize their resources further.

Ensuring Efficient Asset Maintenance & Repair

In a remote work setup, IT teams could struggle in managing support tickets to the point the IT support for the company’s remote workforce comes to a screeching halt. Worse, some tickets could get lost in the shuffle, especially if the IT Service Management software isn’t integrated with Smart asset and inventory management.

This results in work-from-home employees losing productive hours because they don’t have a functioning workstation that will allow them to keep on working. Integrating IT asset management solutions with an existing ITSM tool eliminates this problem.

The remote employee can log repair requests through a self-service portal or on the control panel of the smart locker designated for maintenance and repair. There’s no need for the support team to open the tickets themselves while connecting with the employee via email or call. There’s also no need for a physical meetup.

Technicians can view user maintenance requests from their smart enterprise asset management dashboard and take action immediately. If the malfunctioning device has already been deposited in a locker, they can pick it up and work on it right away. At the same time, they can also deposit a loaner device to the user who reported the issue.

Once the technician completes their task, they can update the ticket, automatically notifying all relevant parties, including the employee who reported the issue. No support tickets will get lost, and every case will receive a proper resolution.

Reclaiming Assets

Reclaiming assets from users can be as tricky as distributing them. The organization must know the exact location of every asset they own so none will get lost and forgotten, as each misplaced company equipment carries substantial risks.

For example, when an employee leaves the company, the assets loaned out to them must be reclaimed. It could be a laptop, smartphone, or any device. Otherwise, there is a risk of unauthorized users accessing sensitive data.

In addition to cybersecurity risks, lost and forgotten assets can also result in a shortage of devices, forcing the company to purchase new equipment to cater to their remote workforce, only for these assets to surface earlier, creating a surplus of devices instead. That’s an unnecessary additional cost that could’ve been prevented.

With a smart asset management system’s ability to provide insights on how many current assets have been deployed and which ones are in storage, a business can reclaim their assets and reexamine which ones they may not genuinely need in supporting a remote workforce. This presents opportunities to save money by reallocating assets to employees requiring them or by completely retiring said asset. That money can be allotted for other more necessary budget items like the security infrastructure of the organization’s remote workforce.

Conclusion

The best IT asset management solutions like Teqtivity can anticipate and address the challenges of remote asset management that many organizations face. Remote working should not be a problem for a digitally aware company.