The Unique Challenges of a University Inventory Control Software Program

The thousands of students coming to your institution rely on you to help support them in dozens of ways. That’s why using a university inventory control software program is a necessity, especially in times of uncertainty.

Typical inventory control methods don’t work in your situation. You have so many people using your assets and investments at any given time that it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks.

But because funding is tight, you can’t just replace all the items in your inventory every time they go missing.

Universities Provide Students Access to High-End Assets

Many of your students wouldn’t have the opportunity to access the assets you provide outside of their schoolwork. Different schools have their own specialized inventory of assets to assist students in their education. The school of arts and design might provide licenses to premium design software, while your school of avionics might give access to state-of-the-art flight simulators.

Teaching your students how to use and maintain these assets is difficult. While your teachers can show them how to use equipment in class, not all students will be able to join an in-person demonstration. That means your assets are subject to misuse and potential damage at the hands of people who don’t know better.

How University Inventory Control Software Programs Differ from Other Inventory Management Solutions

While many inventory management solutions were designed with a high number of assets in mind, most of them weren’t created to track asset usage of hundreds of users.

When your assets are available to hundreds of people, you have to schedule and track regular maintenance. These items have a shorter shelf life because their daily usage is much higher than something similar you might find at a private company.

A university inventory control software program can track asset usage across multiple departments, schools, and campuses. While assets may not be shared across departments, many of them will use similar tools and equipment to complete their job. Tracking similar items in a separate platform creates needless busywork, confusion and expense.

Tracking your assets in a database like this will help you see what sorts of assets your students need to assist them in their schoolwork. You can use the information collected in the tracking process to help you create quarterly reports for each department. With this information, your department heads can ensure funding is going where it will do the most good and help as many students as possible.

With so many students and support staff in the system, solutions with per-user pricing can quickly become too expensive. While many other inventory tracking solutions will charge based on the number of users you have, Asset Panda costs the same whether you have 100 or 10,000 people in your system. Playing musical chairs with limited user seats isn't necessary when you have a solution designed to work for everyone.

Our customizable platform is a great choice for tracking university assets. You can create a system that makes it easy for you to check on your assets as frequently as necessary. Whether you need to monitor them every hour, or simply every day, you can configure fields in each asset for status reports. These tracking logs will help you identify exactly when assets started acting up and make it easier for you to figure out what happened to them and how to plan better for the future.