Understanding ServiceNow's Hardware Asset Substitutes

When it comes to utilizing ServiceNow’s Hardware Asset Management application to manage your assets and models and even promote a product catalog for user requests, this can be daunting to a smaller team with so many environmental changes impacting you. Not to mention the time it can take with already little to spare. A few of our clients have expressed to us how we can make the process easier to support. 

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Key Features of Hardware Asset Substitutes

• Dynamic Asset Management: With hardware asset substitutes, organizations can manage hardware assets dynamically, adapting to changing business requirements and operational needs. Whether adding new assets, retiring obsolete ones, or reallocating resources, substitutes offer organizations the flexibility to adjust quickly and efficiently.

• Automation and Orchestration: Hardware asset substitutes streamline asset management processes and workflows by leveraging automation and orchestration capabilities. Routine tasks such as asset provisioning, tracking, and retirement can be automated, reducing manual effort and administrative overhead.

Our solution utilizes substitutes to make this easier. Substitutes allow you to build a generic model such as “Windows Laptop” or “Apple Laptop” and link specific models to those standards. This way, I can promote and focus what the users are selecting to something generic or common they would expect and allow our Inventory teams to pick out the best match based on what we have in stock or purchase the latest version of these models we support. We have also helped implement this concept for other organizations that can help with the onboarding process or refresh when it comes time to upgrade. 

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Deployment Workflow

Consider this for a deployment workflow that you have been focusing on. ServiceNow has added an Asset Task table [asset_task] that would make it interesting to link up to a feature like this. We could add a related list when these models are linked in and showcase all the assets that match this substitute. That way, we have a view that not only provides the assigned tech with a task of what he needs to do but also a view into the local assets that match this criteria. Beyond this idea, many others could leverage this functionality. We discussed how this might help with bundled models and building out compatible consumables or even other model types beyond IT hardware.

Interested to learn more about hardware asset substitutes or ServiceNow's ITAM? Write to us at chat@rapdev.io