How A County Sheriff's Office Reduced Equipment Loss by 90% with Asset Panda

Summary

A Texas county sheriff’s office with over 500 employees needed a modern, centralized system to manage uniforms, protective gear, serialized equipment, and high-volume consumables. Their existing tools—spreadsheets, manual processes, and a rigid legacy inventory system—were no longer capable of supporting the agency’s scale or operational pace.

The agency sought a platform that could support:

• Bulk inventory tracking for numerous uniform types and sizes
• Serialized asset management for equipment such as radios, tasers, and firearms
• Seamless asset allocation and employee onboarding/offboarding
• Automated workflows and low-stock alerts

Challenges

As they began their search for a centralized asset tracking platform, the county sheriff’s department was facing various challenges.

1. Difficulty Managing a Large and Complex Inventory

With a piecemeal, manual asset tracking system, the sheriff’s office struggled to manage a high-volume inventory with complex variations. Their inventory includes items such as:

• Various types of uniforms with 100+ size variations
• Consumables that frequently require replacement
• Serialized equipment issued to officers

Manually tracking this mixture of unique assets and consumables meant constantly updating thousands of spreadsheet rows—a time-consuming and error-prone method.

2. Inefficient Asset Allocation

With 576 employees frequently requesting new or replacement items, along with returning damaged assets, the agency’s legacy system simply couldn’t keep up. Beyond routine check-ins and check-outs, employee onboarding and offboarding proved to be a tedious task for this inventory manager. The department could have anywhere from 2-10 new employees to onboard each week, all of which would have to be done one at a time in a time-consuming process.

In terms of employee offboarding, the inventory manager had no quick way to see what any one employee had been issued. “When somebody resigns or is terminated, I need to pull up a list of what they have. There’s no easy way to do that today,” the inventory manager said. Coupled with a lack of integration with Workday, the team didn’t have a way to ensure employees were automatically added or deactivated so that assignment records stayed current.

3. Limited Manual Workflows

Through their manual tracking system, the county sheriff’s department struggled to perform workflows as items were returned or disposed of. When uniforms came back damaged or contaminated, they needed to track whether these inventory items were returns or consumptions (aka items that would be disposed of) to maintain accurate stock levels. Their prior system could not distinguish between returns and consumptions in a clean way.

4. Inability to Forecast Future Purchases

Because the agency relied on manually checking spreadsheets each week to determine what needed to be ordered next, their purchases were more reactive than proactive, sometimes causing them to run into issues like stockouts.

The Solution

With these challenges in mind, the county sheriff’s department signed on with Asset Panda to optimize their asset and inventory management. Here are several of the ways the agency has resolved their asset tracking challenges since implementing Asset Panda.

1. Flexible Modeling for Serialized & Bulk Inventory

Using Asset Panda’s highly customizable, no-code solution, the agency can now track all the serialized assets and consumables in one centralized place. Some of their customizations include:

• Serialized items (e.g., firearms, radios, tasers) as individual asset records
• Uniforms and other consumables as bulk inventory with quantity-based fields
• One record per size/type (e.g., “Men’s Pants – Size 38”)
• Custom fields for sizing, description, and reorder thresholds

This allowed them to avoid creating 30,000+ records while still maintaining precise control.

2. Streamlined Processes

With all the data they need in one, up-to-date location, the county sheriff’s office has built repeatable processes for:

• Receiving shipments
• Issuing items to employees
• Returning serialized equipment
• Recording destroyed or consumed items
• Updating inventory quantities automatically

These set workflows allow the team to maintain accurate records, ensure employees have the items they need, and avoid artificially inflating inventory counts by distinguishing between returned and consumed items.

3. Seamless Asset Assignment & Offboarding

With the ability to import all their employee data into Asset Panda, the agency can easily allocate serialized assets and consumables to their team members. Plus, with clear historical records, they can view who has been assigned which assets, streamlining offboarding processes and allowing for accurate audit trails.

4. Robust Reports & Stock Alerts

Through automated reports and alerts, the county sheriff’s department can get real-time insight into low stock levels and replenish items before they run out.

Results

By switching from spreadsheets to a modern, automated platform, this Texas county sheriff’s office has reduced manual asset tracking by 90%. Asset Panda’s blend of customizable fields, workflows, assignment visibility, and automated alerts gave the agency exactly what it needed: speed, accuracy, and control.

The entire system—serialized gear, uniforms, consumables, employee assignments, reordering, and more—now runs through a single, intuitive platform that supports the agency’s mission and scale.

In the future, the sheriff’s office is aiming to integrate Asset Panda with their Workday system to further save time by automatically syncing employee records.

Want to see how Asset Panda can save your public safety agency valuable time? Schedule your personalized walkthrough with a solution specialist today.