Pittsburg, Kansas Quickly and Efficiently Upgrades IT Asset Management

Background

Southeastern Kansas is the home of Crawford County and the city of Pittsburg, which has a population of around 20,000. Though officially founded in 1876, Pittsburg’s history goes back to the 1860s.

Originally named Iowa City, Pittsburg was officially incorporated in 1880. Though coal mining is no longer the backbone of the city that it once was, Pittsburg still enjoys a culture influenced by the many Eastern European mine workers who settled the area in the late 1800s. Today’s Pittsburg is a center of educational and government-related employment.

Challenges

“We needed to have quick access to asset information and tracking of devices by their unique identifiers,” said Jeff Bair, Information Technology Manager.

Whether a government is on the local, state, or federal level, tracking computer assets is extremely important for budgetary discipline as well as accountability. With the wrong IT asset management program in place this process can be extremely inefficient.

The city previously used a free program called Spiceworks for IT asset management. But, the IT team found that they were limited by the organizational structure of the Spiceworks program. Spiceworks offered some IT purchase management functions, but it was not scalable and up to the task of asset management for an entire city. The City of Pittsburg needed a more robust solution with advanced asset management capabilities.

Solution

“Samanage had all the tools we were looking for to keep up-to-date records of our assets and software,” said Blair. It sounds simple, but across departments with varying tasks — including finance, fire protection, administration of parks and recreational facilities, library management, and public works — keeping track of hardware and software assets is a major undertaking.

Choosing software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution rather than an on-premise system was exactly what the city needed. “The cost of Samanage was very reasonable and the ease of using a SaaS solution made it quick and easy to get up and going quickly,” said Bair. “The implementation was very simple. We set up different locations into categories and installed the agent on individual machines. We were up and running quickly.”

Benefits

“With Samanage we have quick access to individual assets and full information on them,” said Blair. “We can see what software versions are running and what hardware our employees have at a glance. We have been able to assess our inventory in minutes and build a plan for the future of our equipment, all while still continuing to keep an eye on the state of each machine.”

The benefits to a city government intent on improving efficiency have been clear. “We are enjoying the product and will continue to use it to make our job easier,” said Blair. “Not having to physically look into a computer to see how much memory or hard drive space it has makes it easy to find outdated machines and provide upgrades.”