In the Enterprise version of Natural HR we offer asset management – you may be thinking, what does asset management have to do with HR? It is a fair question! Often asset management is the responsibility of Facilities for example and not HR.
Natural HR offers a complete HR system that takes the employee lifecycle right from recruitment through to offboarding – for many companies, part of onboarding (and conversely offboarding) is assigning equipment to employees.
It could be IT equipment like a laptop or a phone right through to something more significant like a car but, either way, the company has provided the assets to the employee and, quite rightly, wants them back when the employee leaves.
All too often when there are separate systems for individual tasks it creates a duplication of effort but also increases the opportunity for things to get missed – when the manager gave the employee his phone, was it an iPhone 5 or an iPhone 6? Was it white or was it black? What was the serial number of the device?
You may well have a paper-based process where the manager records this information and then sends a copy to you for filing and a copy back to facilities or some other place – all this paper creates more opportunities for things to get missed.
By integrating asset management into the HR system, it allows the manager or HR to integrate the allocation of assets into the onboarding process – centrally you can find out what assets are available and where all your assets are.
When the time comes for the employee to leave, by having an asset check as a part of your offboarding process you can run an asset report which shows all the assets assigned to that employee. So you know exactly what they should be returning – you know it was a black 32GB iPhone 5S.
Assuming the asset is still usable, you can check it back in and use it again. At a more granular level, you can find out how many phones you have in the organisation but also when the warranty is expiring or how much they cost for budgeting.
This not only reduces mistakes (not to mention creating less paperwork!) but it also saves the company both time and money – something few companies have the luxury of having too much of!
