Asset Tracking For School District Campuses
The IT/Tech department with Hastings Public Schools started using Asset Panda for school asset tracking just over five years ago when the software was just being introduced. We have grown as Asset Panda has grown and we can not imagine tracking our assets without it!
Our department tracks primarily computer-related pieces of equipment like laptops, projectors, etc. over 8 campuses in the school district. Before Asset Panda, each campus was responsible for their own individual excel spreadsheet. Each staff member was responsible for entering all the details for each piece of equipment. The spreadsheets were filled with errors including inaccurate check in/check out details (if even entered at all), the database of recording equipment didn’t match up what we had when it came to audit time, serial numbers weren’t typed in correctly and therefore weren’t found. Sometimes staff didn’t enter anything about certain assets and we didn’t know where equipment was or even who had it. We definitely were in need of a process to track these expensive assets that could be taken over by the IT department and managed in a way that everyone could be accountable for the assets used among all campuses.
Asset Panda gave us the control over our assets in one easy to manage place versus our previous format. While some staff was reluctant to hand over that control, the difference it’s made in our daily processes and the incredible savings just in man hours alone to manage and track down assets has more than proven Asset Panda’s value for us.
One of the key features that have proven to be most beneficial is the check in/check out feature. Each fall we deploy over 1,000 laptops to our high school students. With Asset Panda’s built-in barcode scanner, we can easily scan each laptop as it’s assigned to every student and document everything we need to know about that laptop in one easy step. This process makes the line run more efficiently and saves us a lot of time of manually entering data about each laptop. We know how many laptops have been checked out; how many are at each campus; if any come in for maintenance; and who has possession of the laptop. Then at the end of the year, we can rescan the laptop for check in and it’s listed back in inventory and ready for the next school year. It’s so simple! We also deploy laptops to all of our faculty members when they join the district and we can track the entire lifecycle of their equipment for as long as it’s in use during their employment.
The reporting function has been a real time-saver for us as well. We set up custom fields right at the beginning and have been able to tailor them to our needs as we’ve grown and our needs have changed. Having data available to us when it comes to maintenance reports and details on the age of certain pieces of equipment has been useful when it comes to audit time and the decisions on buying new equipment and what needs to be changed out or completely replaced. We really appreciate that data is available at any moment in real time and there is no more frustrating wasted time waiting for a report from each campus on what assets they have (or think they have).
The customer support has been wonderful from day one. They are very responsive and have been able to come up with solutions to help us enhance the system to what we need it to be. The training process was simple in learning how to use Asset Panda and the support team has been with us each step of the way as we migrated our outdated process to what we have in place today.
In a school environment, time is money. With Asset Panda we have saved a great deal of time and our team is understanding how important it is to know where all of your assets are and the impact that knowledge can have on an entire district.
Kathy Riese, SIS Data Coordinator
