Asset Auditing With Mobile Barcode Scanner using ServiceDesk Plus

A number of clients have been requesting the capability to perform a simple audit of in-situ assets using a simple mobile barcode scanner to record the date and time the asset was last seen.

With the enhanced capabilities of the ServiceDesk Plus mobile app in conjunction with ServiceDesk Plus Professional or Enterprise On-Premise solution it is now possible to add and retrieve asset information via your mobile device. The following shows the Asset screen in the ServiceDesk Plus Mobile App and the barcode scan screen. You can also scan multiple assets to be added to ServiceDesk Plus.

Once you have your scanned barcodes selecting the ‘tick’ will then prompt you to enter the details for the Asset. Note that in order to be able to complete this step you will need to have setup your Product Types and Products in ServiceDesk Plus first.

Once you have entered the details click the ‘tick’ to save. Note that data can be entered in the Comments field but it is not currently saved to the Asset details in ServiceDesk Plus. The app will show the result of adding the asset data. In the screenshots below you can see that one barcode was already entered in the ServiceDesk Plus asset register.

Whatever method you use to initially populate your asset register, manual entry, USB barcode scanner, data import or via the mobile app, you can then use the mobile app to retrieve the details of the asset simply by scanning the asset barcode.

This got us thinking. What if you could detect the barcode scan of the asset and then update the asset details with the current date and time? To do this we created some Asset Additional Fields in ServiceDesk Plus (we used a text field for ‘Last Seen Date’ as ServiceDesk Plus stores date information in SQL formats and we wanted to see a readable date in the mobile app).

Now with a Powershell script running on the ServiceDesk Plus application server, we are able to detect a barcode scan on the mobile app via the ServiceDesk Plus log files and retrieve the asset information from the asset lookup details. Next, we can get the script to call the ServiceDesk Plus API and update the asset details ‘Last Seen Date’ and ‘Last Seen Time’ fields with the current date and time (the ‘Last Barcode Scan Date’ and ‘Last Barcode Scan Time’ are Configuration Item custom fields that can be configured on a per Product Type basis in the Enterprise Edition of ServiceDesk Plus).

Cool huh?

If you’d like to know more about the capabilities of ServiceDesk Plus and the Mobile App for asset auditing please feel free to contact our consultancy team on 01403 588 898, drop us an email at info@set3.co.uk or register your details on our contact form

Enjoy!

For more information, if you need any help, or have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.