Texas A&M University Standardizes Asset Tracking Across Departments with Asset Panda on AWS

About Texas A&M University

Texas A&M University is one of the largest public research universities in the United States and the flagship of the broader Texas A&M System, which spans academic colleges, athletics, and statewide service agencies. Its technology footprint is highly decentralized, with individual departments and agencies each managing their own fleets of IT and audiovisual equipment.

The teams represented in this case study include central Technology Services, which runs equipment checkout for laptops, cameras, projectors, and production gear; Athletics IT, which supports the athletics department's computing environment; the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX), a statewide emergency-response and workforce-training agency that manages fixed assets across multiple divisions; and university academic teams standardizing their tracking on Asset Panda's next-generation platform. Across these units, staff are responsible for large volumes of state-owned equipment that must be tracked accurately and accounted for over the full asset lifecycle.

The Challenge

As a large institution, Texas A&M needed a consistent, auditable way to track AV and IT assets across departments that each had different workflows, tools, and starting points. Some teams were tracking devices in JIRA or scattered spreadsheets, while others were coming off an older asset program where physical inventory was frequently identified only by state-procurement barcodes managed by a separate department. Without one centralized platform, the institution lacked a reliable, real-time view of what equipment it owned, where it was, who had it, and where each item sat in its lifecycle.

The university's operational needs were demanding and varied across teams.

• Central Technology Services needed a checkout system for a shared pool of surplus and loaner equipment, with expected return dates, plus statuses beyond simply "checked in" and "checked out," including re-image, maintenance, surplus, and disposal.
• Athletics IT needed to keep a growing device fleet synchronized with its Microsoft Intune and Active Directory environment and to manage a large Apple footprint through Jamf.
• TEEX needed to manage fixed assets across many divisions, each with its own property manager, all while retaining historical records of disposed assets for compliance.

These Texas A&M teams needed to migrate cleaning off their legacy programs, import large data sets into a unified system, and roll out barcode scanning and standardized forms. Without these capabilities, they faced risks such as:

• Equipment and consumables walking off with no record
• No clear audit trail for disposed or surplused assets
• Manual data-entry errors
• Duplicated tooling and effort across departments
• Time spent hunting for information, such as BitLocker recovery keys, across multiple disconnected systems

At the scale of a university system, these gaps translate directly into lost assets, failed audits, and wasted staff hours.

Partner Solution

Asset Panda gave each Texas A&M team a configurable asset platform built around groups, custom fields, and processes that could be tailored per department without standing up separate systems.

Workflows

For Technology Services, Asset Panda's implementation specialist scoped and configured a checkout workflow with expected return dates alongside re-image, maintenance, external-repair, surplus, and disposal statuses, plus an archival feature that deactivates retired records while preserving their full history and change logs on a separate page.

Consumables such as cables and peripherals are tracked by quantity so the team can see exactly when stock leaves and who took it, and the built-in barcode generator lets the team create labels while also reading the existing state-procurement barcodes already on many devices, avoiding a re-labeling project.

Integrations

A major part of Asset Panda's value came through integrations, delivered natively within the platform. Athletics IT synced its device fleet from Microsoft Intune and its user accounts from on-premises Active Directory, and during an account review Asset Panda enabled a Jamf Pro integration to bring the department's Apple fleet under the same system, with Single Sign-On and Microsoft Entra ID identified as logical next steps.

Technology Services connected its existing device records from JIRA rather than re-entering them by hand. Because these connectors are part of Asset Panda's catalog, each team could adopt only the integrations relevant to its environment.

AI & Automations

University teams standardized on Asset Panda Pro, the platform's next-generation version, which added automations (conditional "if this, then that" logic), configurable forms with color-coded fields, saved views and dashboards for reporting, and a redesigned mobile app with an offline mode and matrix (multi-item) barcode scanning. Pro also includes Ursa, a built-in AI assistant that answers configuration questions in-product, giving staff another self-service resource alongside the platform's Knowledge Center.

The Asset Panda platform, including Asset Panda Pro, is delivered as a fully managed, cloud-native SaaS application running on Amazon Web Services in the US East (N. Virginia) Region, so each Texas A&M team consumes the service with no infrastructure to run on-premises and no per-department servers to maintain. The primary AWS services underpinning the solution are: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which runs Asset Panda’s containerized web, API, background-processing, and scheduled-job workloads, including the recurring jobs that sync device and user data from Microsoft Intune, Active Directory, Jamf Pro, and JIRA; Amazon RDS for MySQL, the managed relational database that stores each department’s asset records, custom fields, and workflows, along with the change logs and archived asset histories that support audit requirements, across a primary writer and read replicas; Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, which backs application caching and the prioritized job queues that keep integration syncs, data imports, and report generation running behind the scenes; Amazon S3, which provides durable object storage for photos and attachments, generated barcode labels, and report and CSV exports, with downloads delivered through time-limited pre-signed URLs; Amazon OpenSearch Service, which indexes platform API activity so data changes can be searched and audited, a useful control for a public institution accountable for state-owned property; and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) with AWS CodeBuild, which form the automated container build-and-release pipeline Asset Panda uses to deliver platform updates to every department without downtime.

As a managed service provider, Asset Panda supported every team across the full lifecycle. During implementation, a dedicated implementation specialist ran a structured onboarding, an initial kickoff and scoping session, hands-on account build, data migration from JIRA, spreadsheets, and legacy programs, a system-overview training and an administrator configuration training, and a final go-live review, typically on a 30-to-60-day timeline (most teams landing in the 30-to-45-day range). For the University's Pro rollout, a specialist ran recurring weekly training sessions through go-live, walking staff through imports, forms, automations, and mobile scanning.

After go-live, each account transitions to a dedicated client director for ongoing check-ins, renewals, and proactive enablement, backed by 24/7 customer support via chat, email, and phone, an extensive self-service Knowledge Center, and the Ursa AI assistant. During routine account reviews, client directors surfaced additional capabilities the teams were not yet using, such as the Jamf integration and archiving, turning support touchpoints into expansion opportunities.

The Results

Asset Panda has become a shared standard across multiple independent Texas A&M units, adopted by TEEX and Athletics IT while expanding into central Technology Services and university academic teams. Standardizing workflows across one platform replaced a patchwork of JIRA records, spreadsheets, and legacy programs with a single, real-time view of equipment across departments, so leaders can see what the institution owns, where it is, and who has it. Because the platform is configured rather than custom-built, new departments reach go-live in as little as 30 days, letting each unit standardize quickly instead of standing up its own system.

The clearest gains came from automation and accountability. Native integrations with Intune, Active Directory, Jamf, and JIRA replaced manual device tracking with continuous automated syncs, saving an estimated 15 or more staff hours per month per team and keeping records accurate without hand-entry.

Staff who once navigated several Microsoft consoles to retrieve details such as BitLocker recovery keys now find them in one place, turning multi-minute lookups into a few seconds. Checkout and consumables tracking closed long-standing accountability gaps on loaner equipment and peripherals that previously went missing, and reading existing state-procurement barcodes let teams adopt the system with no re-labeling project. Athletics IT summed up the effect simply: its assets became "a lot easier to track."

For a public institution accountable for state-owned property, the compliance benefit was just as valuable. Archiving gave TEEX and Athletics a permanent, auditable history of disposed and surplused assets while keeping active views uncluttered, helping turn what had been a multi-week annual inventory reconciliation into a process measured in days and strengthening audit readiness across divisions.

Just as important, Asset Panda's self-service resources, the Knowledge Center and the Ursa AI assistant, made teams largely self-sufficient: staff taught themselves the platform and reached confident, independent operation by go-live, reducing reliance on outside support.

The major results the institution has seen since implementing Asset Panda include:

• Faster onboarding
• Fewer lost assets
• Cleaner audits
• Staff hours redirected from manual tracking to higher-value work

Multiple Texas A&M teams have renewed their agreements with Asset Panda, including multi-year commitments.

About the Partner

Asset Panda, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Dallas, Texas, is an asset tracking, inspection, and audit platform used by organizations across financial services, government, education, healthcare, and enterprise IT in more than 140 industries to manage the full lifecycle of their physical and digital assets. Delivered as a cloud-based SaaS application on AWS with native iOS and Android mobile apps, the platform lets customers model any trackable item with custom fields, workflows, granular user permissions, barcode generation, and a broad catalog of integrations (including Microsoft Intune, Active Directory / Entra ID, Jamf Pro, and JIRA), and, in Asset Panda Pro, adds automations, offline mobile scanning, and the Ursa AI assistant.

Asset Panda is an AWS Partner whose platform is built and operated entirely on AWS, running its production workloads on Amazon EKS with Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon OpenSearch Service, and delivering software through an AWS-native CI/CD pipeline built on AWS CodeBuild and Amazon ECR.