QR codes and IT Asset Management

In the beginning we had bar-codes… The idea has been around since the late ‘40s, but it didn’t really start seeing commercial use until the mid ‘70s. That’s when the NAFC (National Association of Food Chains) standardized the Uniform Grocery Product Code, and we’ve been using UPC codes ever since. UPC allows you to represent 11 digits in a standard bar-code form that can be read rapidly, from a a variety of angles, by a simple laser and rotating mirror arrangement. The technology is tried and true, but it’s getting a little old in the tooth.

Then, in the mid ‘90s, a Toyota subsidiary devised a 2-dimensional format called Quick Response Code (QR Code for short), which has caught on and become one of the more popular standards. QR Codes offer far more flexibility than the old UPC code; they can store a large amount of data (8kb) and they also store a “type”; a QR Code can represent plain text, a URL, an email address, a vCard and a number of other common internet objects.

We at SAManage are very excited about the potential of bar-codes and QR Codes, and how they can integrate into the SAManage IT Asset Management universe and our mobile strategy. The combination of an SAManage mobile scanning app and our forthcoming mobile web interface will enable some very slick possibilities.

Integrating on-premise and SaaS

Imagine a technician walking up to a QR Coded asset, scanning it with her Android phone and, presto, the SAManage page for that asset shows up on her phone’s browser; she can then pull up any incidents that are associated with that asset and update their status, or enter a note, or add a life-cycle event indicating the machine is about to be sent out for service.

Or, how about an IT auditor, using his iPad and the SAManage mobile scanning app, walking around an office floor and performing an inventory audit just by scanning QR Codes on assets. The mobile scanning app will automatically create a new life-cycle event for that asset in SAManage, with a time- and date-stamp, indicating that the asset has been inventoried.

A technician in the warehouse receives a new printer. He scans the bar-code on the box… The SAManage mobile scanning app detects that this is a new asset, it performs an Internet search for that bar-code and automatically create a new asset in SAManage it then pre-populates common fields like Manufacturer, Model Number, Serial Number and Receive Date into the new record which will save the technician valuable time, reducing the amount of information he has to enter manually and decreasing the likely of fat-fingered data.

Bar codes and QR codes integration with SaaS based IT Asset Management solutions and leveraging mobile devices as the delivery funnel represents an interesting opportunity that we will be tackling soon. Stay tuned!

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Related posts:

1. Generate Bar and QR codes in SAManage
2. Taking the Pain out of IT Audits with SAManage
3. The Challenge of Managing Mobile Asset Inventory
4. IT Service Catalogs and How They Enhance IT Asset Management
5. Whitepaper: IT Asset Management and IT Asset Disposal Synergies