Company Profile
CUSTOMER PROFILE: Michigan Department of Technology,
Management & Budget (DTMB)
George W. Romney Building 111 South Capitol Avenue
Lansing, MI 48933
www.michigan.gov/dtmb
Industry: Government
Situation
With over 21,000 square feet of hosting space, the DTMB faced difficulty manually keeping track of the thousands of servers, storage devices, networking equipment, and other IT assets being utilized in the state’s two consolidated data centers. With such a large amount of inventory on hand, the DTMB was challenged to efficiently and accurately control IT expenditures, provide sound information for budgeting, planning and financial reporting, and optimize the return on the state’s IT asset investment.
Solution
In partnership with the State of Michigan, Lowry designed and implemented an RFID- based asset tracking solution powered by the LowryTrack Asset Control System (ACS). This system used passive RFID tags, mobile computers powered by the ACS mobile app, and a network of fixed RFID readers strategically placed throughout the data centers to track the organizations IT assets. The system automatically tracks the location of each IT asset and tagged piece of equipment throughout the facilities without human intervention, and makes this information available through the ACS web application and web-based reporting module. With ACS, users are able to easily locate assets, commission new servers and other assets, print RFID tags, and view complete historical data for each asset. ACS is fully integrated with the CMDB through the ACS SOAP Web Service API, increasing the accuracy of information in both systems and eliminating the need for double entry of new assets. IT managers now automatically receive real-time alerts when unauthorized moves that don’t match the operational status of assets are detected by the system.
Results
Using ACS to keep track of their servers and other IT assets provides the DTMB with more accurate location information. This allows technicians to easily locate assets, resulting in a reduction in wasted labor used to locate misplaced assets. In addition, the improved tracking information enables the DTMB to save an enormous amount of time previously spent performing inventory control activities by reducing the required frequency of inventory audits and the time and effort required to complete them. Finally, the DTMB has achieved increased asset accountability and process accountability among their employees by reducing process exceptions associated with installations, moves, adds, changes, and disposals. This all results in $160,000 saved annually.
