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Question

Physical Inventory

  • July 14, 2011
  • 3 replies
  • 10 views
J
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Hey everyone -

I know the JSS has some great tools for managing your live inventory-- when the resource is on the floor and calling home.

But we're interested in strengthening our pre and post JSS inventory - so when machines first arrive but aren't out of the box yet. Then similarly, after they have retired to a storage area in a different building.

One of the JSS-based solutions we are looking into involves scanning the boxes from apple when they arrive, manually creating a JSS Client from that scan and then supplementing the entry with manually added data like "Joe's department." On the back end we'd have smart groups that categorize it for us.

Ultimately giving us something like this: one spot where we would be able to look and see how many Mac Pro's we still have in inventory for Joe's team and how many we have for John's team and how many of Jane's G5's are in storage, ready to be recycled.

We're also curious about alternate ways of doing this. Does anyone use a third party app for managing their physical inventory? And if so, does it tie into your JSS data at all?

Or is there a better way of leveraging the JSS for this kind of thing?
Any suggestions for physical asset tags?

thanks!

ben janowski
Senior Macintosh Support Technician
Kohl's Mac Support Team
262.703.1396 | benjamin.janowski at kohls.com

    3 replies

    D
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    • Dtwerdohlib
    • New Contributor
    • July 14, 2011

    Hey Ben,

    The only little complication (I think, but I could be wrong) I can see with pre/post JSS Inventory is that it uses up a seat on your license. If you have enough room for that then I suppose it's all good then.

    What we like to do is keep the JSS storing active equipment only. Everything else is deleted when it's time to 'put it out to pasture'. One program we do use though for other inventory items is LightSpeed. It's very good from what i've seen. Comes in handy when I need to bill a school for repairs and whatnot. I think there is a barcode generator too.

    As for 'tags'....what we do is we have lot numbers attached to each shipment that comes in. So if we get a shipment of books we'll tag it with a number, then we use that number as a part of our label naming convention for the laptops. For example one laptop could be labeled MB23-001. MB is for MacBook, 23 is the lot number it was from, and then the number the the series. We put these labels on all our laptops. Makes it very easy to identify . The labelling and inventory is a lot of work but it pays off for sure. Especially when we need to identify equipment that has a recall notice on it.

    Hope that helps

    Dan Twerdohlib
    Network/Computer Tech
    Lakeland Catholic School Division No.150
    780-815-0071
    dtwerdohlib at lcsd150.ab.ca

    ImAMacGuy
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    • ImAMacGuy
    • Esteemed Contributor
    • July 14, 2011

    +10.5

    John Wojda

    Lead System Engineer, DEI & Mobility

    3333 Beverly Rd. B2-338B

    Hoffman Estates, IL 60179

    Phone: (847)286-7855

    Page: (224)532.3447

    Team Lead DEI: Matt Beiriger
    <mailto:mbeirig at searshc.com;jwojda at searshc.com?subject=John%20Wojda%20Fe
    edback&body=I%20am%20contacting%20you%20regarding%20John%20Wojda.>

    Team Lead Mobility: Chris
    <mailto:cstaana at searshc.com;jwojda at searshc.com?subject=John%20Wojda%20Fe
    edback&body=I%20am%20contacting%20you%20regarding%20John%20Wojda.> Sta
    Ana

    Mac Tip/Tricks/Self Service & Support
    <http://bit.ly/gMa7TB>

    "Any time you choose to be inflexible in your approach to an
    unpredictable project you are already building failure into your plan"

    stevewood
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    • stevewood
    • Hall of Fame
    • July 14, 2011

    You can set a "retired" piece of equipment to unmanaged and that will not
    eat up a license. It does make your inventory very large if you have a lot
    of devices retiring each year.

    I do this with our equipment t when it is returned from lease. I just
    uncheck the manage checkbox in the JSS for the piece of equipment.

    On the front end I use an Excel spreadsheet and a barcode reader to capture
    the assets as they come in. I can then copy and paste the serial numbers
    into a Pre Stage in the JSS.

    Steve

    Sent from Somewhere

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