I am doing research into a project for my apprenticeship regarding stock management and through my research I believe what I am looking for is a perpetual inventory system. For context, I work within the IT Admin team and we are responsible for providing requested service catalogue items to customers, and I'd like to include our stock levels within the system so we know when our stock levels are getting low for both ourselves and our other teams such as the Service Desk (if possible). Is there a way to implement this via Freshservice, or has anyone else had an experience attempting to work this? As we already use FreshService it would be ideal to continue using this or at least an integration with the product. I have looked on the community and can’t find anything, but any information would be a massive help.
TIA.
Page 1 / 1
There’s two ways to do this….
If you are using the inventory system you’re about halfway there. When tickets for device issuance are being issued, you will want to use the fulfill option on the SR. It will bring up a screen like the below and after clicking next the stage/assignee/department/etc will populate based on the requested for user. You can also set the asset state from the next screen.
This *requires* the service catalog item have the fulfillment options set to a single device type (see below).
Unfortunately this means your org has to have a single item assigned to the Service Catalog item for it. This could be a problem if your org has 3 offerings for laptops; you’d need to create one for each type of device. As models change you can modify the product without much effort. My org doesnt have a standard make/model number so this isnt possible.
To reduce admin overhead/allow flexibility, my org has setup asset automations where if the last login by changes on a device, the device gets pulled to in use instead of in stock and assigns it to the specified user.
This doesnt account for things that do not have their information pulled via discovery probe/agent (Linux/Mac/Windows machines).
Inventory for non-network connected items you’d have to stick with option 1. You can use the discovery probe to discover/add network infrastructure, etc (pending they are able accept SNMP/windows/ssh credentials) and put them into in use on discovery (since they are on the network you can assume they are being used).
We have all of the above supplemented by a daily scheduled automation where if a device doesnt check in for 30 days, a ticket is created (this has to be done via API) to investigate the devices usage/status. This allows for the inventory to be kept up as devices become inactive or returned from users leaving and put on a shelf, they can be moved to in stock/retired as applicable.
This all revolves around network connected stuff for the most part, but if you can automate that, the rest becomes manageable.
We’re looking at it for laptops but also more generic kit in stock such as monitors and headsets etc. It looks as though we have to add each item individually, rather than do a bulk upload. Did you find this too, or is there a way around having to add each individual item of stock or is there a way to do this in bulk?
Thanks.
You can bulk import off a CSV to get started or over time. Open up the inventory screen and hit import. You’ll have to have fields specified that are required (to find these I’d recommend creating a new asset with the asset type selected, then you’ll know what fields you require and what are unnecessary. Headsets or consumables like keyboards/mice will be a pain in the rear to track if there are no serial numbers on them to identify them.
I dont recall the role needed to do bulk importing (if it’s admin or just create inventory) but here’s the screenshot from the inventory screen in FS.
