How a Granite Fabrication
Company Boosts Efficiency and
Standardization with Asset Panda
Summary
This granite fabrication company specializes in countertops and cabinetry for the home-building industry and has been a trusted partner to some of America's most successful large-scale residential builders for over 20 years. With various fabrication manufacturing facilities across Texas and Oklahoma, the company processes hundreds of countertops each week and maintains a consistent, high-quality inventory.
While the company manages various tools and equipment across their locations, they first signed on with Asset Panda in 2021 to track their IT devices. Their CIO led the search for an asset management solution and has since scaled their Asset Panda program to also track a fleet of about 40 trucks.
The Challenge
When the CIO first joined the company, they did not have an asset management solution in place. Without this, their team faced a few challenges:
- IT device tracking: Initially, the company had no way of tracking how many IT devices they had on hand, where they were, and what their condition was. This was the primary issue the CIO looked to solve as the leader of a growing IT team.
- Lack of standardization: With 6 different locations, the CIO began to notice that each branch tended to use different processes and there was no real standardization across the organization. While he was primarily seeking an IT asset management solution, he also had the bigger picture in mind of standardizing and centralizing company-wide processes.
- Software sprawl: With the various branches using their own processes, this also led to a lot of software sprawl within the company. The CIO aimed to find a solution that could cater to various departments and use cases to compress the overwhelming number of applications the team was using.
The Solution
When the CIO began his search for an asset management platform, he didn't waste any time putting their inventory into spreadsheets and instead went straight to Google, where he found Asset Panda. "Asset Panda jumped out at me as something that was very easy to set up without a whole lot of implementation overhead," he says. "It's simple, it's easy, it works."
In their first year on board, the team began managing around 500 IT devices in Asset Panda. Soon, the company began to grow as they expanded into cabinetry, which meant the IT team and their number of devices subsequently grew. As the team scaled their Asset Panda program, they also worked to standardize various processes – for example, every asset over a certain value gets its own barcode before it is deployed.
Asset Panda has also allowed the granite fabrication company to expand their program beyond simply managing IT devices, which was something the CIO wanted as part of a longer-term strategy. "Another reason I picked Asset Panda is because it's not just an IT tool," he says. "I knew other departments would be interested [in asset management] one day, which they now are, so I thought we could grow into this and use it for other things as well."
While their team is already tracking a fleet of vehicles, they have various plans in mind to scale their program even further in the future. The CIO expressed plans to track more assets such as equipment and tools, as well as find opportunities for other departments to create their own Asset Panda instances. He also hopes to leverage integrations to break down data silos and unify his tech stack.
Conclusion
The granite fabrication company's IT team has already seen quite an increase in efficiency and standardization since signing on with Asset Panda. However, they still have various goals and aspirations to grow their asset management program and continue to standardize processes organization-wide. Currently, the Head of Manufacturing is also considering creating an additional Asset Panda instance for equipment and tool tracking.
“Asset Panda jumped out at me as something that was very easy to set up without a whole lot of implementation overhead,” he says. “It’s simple, it’s easy, it works.”