Locating missing Chromebooks: How Asset Management Tracking can help school board IT leaders

School board IT leaders, it’s okay if you don’t know where all the Chromebooks are. And, if you’re like most school districts, you have difficulty tracking the whereabouts of all your devices and technology. What’s important, though, is that you recognize that lack of asset tracking is a problem.

The solution

The solution to the asset management problem is how to keep track of devices and assets as you move forward. This starts with setting up a process to keep track of your inventory. Once you establish a process for creating order, your asset management tracking efforts can work for you.

However, when you’re constantly getting updates from many different sources (operator information and data from spreadsheets), it’s hard to accurately keep track of all assets in and throughout the school district.

The first step to asset management success

A wholesale audit is not how you locate all of your assets. Today’s audit is only as good as the moment the audit is completed. Tomorrow that audit is no good, and the inaccuracies begin again because assets are always moving. The most important first step is getting the IT team to agree on a process for how to update asset management processes internally.

Total buy-in is essential to asset management success. The entire IT team must be on board. To begin, use the asset information you have available. With IT team buy-in and follow-through, changes in asset ownership are detected and you’ll be able to locate and track all your Chromebooks and other technology in a relatively short period.

Who was the last logged-in device user?

An excellent place to start is by asking who the last logged-in device user was. Then identify the difference between the last person who logged in and the last person to whom the device was assigned (students switch Chromebooks). Asset management inventory is updated when a Chromebook moves from one student to another or one school to another.

When current ownership is determined, the IT team must update or reassign with whom or where the device now belongs to. Updating this information as it is determined creates a living audit, vital to ensuring you know where all your Chromebooks and other devices are.

There’s a simple solution: place all information in one platform in one location, and make asset tracking simple and easy to manage going forward!

Get started with best-of-breed asset management!

With TOPdesk, you can set up a notification so that when an asset’s information is imported into the solution, future events are triggered. For example, after a tracked Chromebook becomes inactive or goes unused, TOPdesk archives the Chromebook and identifies it as not having been located or used on the school district’s system within a pre-determined amount of time (say, six months).

Give it a free try, here! Once a device is pinged as inactive, TOPdesk can email the last logged-in user to ask if they have seen the device or message a technician, notifying them to contact the last logged-in user.

The benefits of automated asset management

Likewise, IT leaders can update or reassign the asset, schedule it for maintenance, and keep the living audit up to date – all within TOPdesk. Putting everything on a centralized, uniform platform like TOPdesk makes asset management easier to manage and maintain. Automated asset management delivers tangible value for education’s IT managers.

The benefits are striking, including:

• More consistent device management
• Preventing loss or theft, and
• A meaningful reduction in costs associated with increased process automation

Additionally, TOPdesk increases IT desk efficiency, automates device surveillance, and decreases costs for device management.

TOPdesk helps reduce waste and loss of devices by up to 30% and helps increase device utilization, prevent needless device purchases, and lower support and licensing expenses.

We help school IT teams embrace and eliminate asset management challenges and experience better asset utilization and investment in technology!