Welcome
🎉 Welcome to Assets | Lapine Studios! 🎉
Firstly, we wish to thank you for trying Assets and for supporting our team. We look forward to working with you to gain better control of your assets.
Contact Information
If you need to reach out to Lapine Studios for any Assets related questions, please use the following addresses:
| Purpose | Address |
|---|---|
| Contact | contact@assets.lapine.studio |
| Support | support@assets.lapine.studio |
Onboarding
Effectively and cleanly migrating your existing asset register, processes, and policies requires some planning. This onboaridng should walk through the key technical considerations when migrating to Assets.
Decide What to Migrate
Before creating any assets within Assets, we strongly recommend that you consider your use case for Assets. In particular, we recommend that you consider each of the categories of asset you intend to manage with Assets. Assets operates as a collision-free register and may require some changes to the way you currently index or handle assets.
Collision-Free Register
Assets requires that each asset is uniquely identified. Assets does this by giving every asset a unique company index, numerically identifying the asset within the company. An asset also have a unique index number assigned to it based upon the 'type' of asset. In Assets, an asset type is known as a template. Finally, one or both of these unique values is used to create a company-unique label that indentifies the asset.
Because of these features, there may be an incompatability between your existing labeling system (and any labels you may have assigned to assets) and the way Assets handles assets. For this reason, you will need to consider whether you will create a new label schema for Assets moving forward, migrate your assets and assign them new labels, or keep the existing label system and work with Assets to migrate your existing technology.
How to Prepare for Onboarding
The following steps will make the technical transition into Assets easier.
Identify and Create Inventories and Templates
A migration works best into Assets if you can do everything all at once. If you partially onboard your fleet, and continue to assign unique numbers to assets outside of assets, you may create a situation that is hard to neatly resolve in the future.
The following steps work through preparing your Assets environment for your assets:
- Find all the existing asset registers within your organisation. These may be articles in a platform such as Confluence, spreadsheets and documents in a SharePoint, or an excel spreadsheet saved on a file server somewhere. You may need to work with your departments in order to identify all the places you store your assets.
- Identify all the 'types' of asset you track within your registers. A 'type' or 'category' of an asset might be something like 'Phone', 'Laptop', 'Server', 'Key', 'Car', 'Shovel'; any term that clearly defines what the thing you are tracking is. Do not identify models or specific subcategories of the asset at this stage. Now is also a great time to consider anything you may not be tracking but may wish to. Consider whether your organisation tracks access cards or keycards in a structured way, or business phones and promotional kits.
- Create a template for each category using our guide on how to create a template.
- Identify all the ways that you group your assets presently. This might be by department, or by storage facility, for example. You may already be tracking items assigned to 'Team 6', or to the 'English' teaching department. You might instead be tracking data assets such as servers in the groups 'Development' and 'Production'.
- Create an inventory for each logical grouping of assets using our guide on how to create an inventory.
Create A Label Schema in Assets
Once you are happy with your inventories and templates, it is time to consider whether you will migrate your existing labels into Assets, or create a new schema. Label schemas in Assets allow for a reference to the asset's inventory and their template. This allows dynamic labels to be genreated based upon the logical group assignment in the form of an inventory, and the category in the form of a template. A set of valid asset label schema and template are shown below for the fictional company 'Bunny Widgets Co'. Company-specific values are recommended, but not required.
| Label Schema | Inventory Label | Template Label | Company Index | Template Index | Generated Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
{AT_SH}-{AT_ID} |
Sales | PHN | 33 | 12 | PHN-12 |
{IN_SH}:{AT_SH}:{AT_ID} |
Sales | PHN | 33 | 12 | Sales:PHN:12 |
{CM_SH}-{AS_ID} |
Sales | PHN | 33 | 12 | BWC-33 |
{CM_SH}_{AT_SH}_{AT_ID} |
Sales | PHN | 33 | 12 | BWC_PHN_12 |
{CM_SH}-{IN_SH}-{AT_SH}-{AT_ID} |
Sales | PHN | 33 | 12 | BWC-Sales-PHN-12 |
{CM_NM} {IN_SH} {AS_ID} |
Sales | PHN | 33 | 12 | Bunny Widgets Co Sales 33 |
ASSET:{AS_ID} |
Sales | PHN | 33 | 12 | ASSET:33 |
DEP:{IN_SH} NUM:{AS_ID} |
Sales | PHN | 33 | 12 | DEP:Sales NUM:33 |
{IN_SH} {AT_ID} ({AT_NM}) |
Sales | PHN | 33 | 12 | Sales 12 (Phone) |
{IN_SH} {AT_NM} ({AT_ID}) |
Sales | PHN | 33 | 12 | Sales Phone (12) |
If your existing label mechnism is compatible with Assets and the inventories and templates you have created, you will be able to import the respective attributes of your existing attribues into Assets and have the label correctly assigned to the asset. If your existing asset labels do not align with the Assets label system, you have two choices:
- Import the assets with the old label scheme and change your labelling pattern for assets moving forward.
- Import your assets without their labels and have Assets assign them new labels. This will require printing purchasing and applying new physical labels to your assets if you track them with physical labels.
Using our guide on how to change the label schema, change the default label schema to one that your organisation wishes to use for assets managed in Assets.
Prepare Existing Assets for Import
Assets allows you to import assets using a Comma Separated Variable (CSV) sheet. The preparation for this CSV document depends on whether you want assets to reassign labels, accept your existing labels, or reconcile your labels with the Assets label schema.
The following articles help you prepare your assets for importing into Assets, depending on your approach.
| Approach | Steps |
|---|---|
| Keep legacy labels and use new labels from Assets | Create a CSV with the required fields and import |
| Integrate existing labels into Assets with a matching schema | Import Assets with Labels Conflicting with Assets' label schema |
Configure Roles, Groups, and Permissions
Before allowing users into your application, consider who will be an administrator for assets. Consider if your company will require off-boarding and on-boarding policies and instructions for users who will manage assets within Assets. As a rule of thumb, access to assets within Assets is configured based on inventories.
Inventories allow users to access their assets in one of two ways:
- Inventories have 'company-wide' permissions, if you wish them to be open to all users.
- Inventories can be the target of group permissions, if a user is added to an appropriate group.
Decide if your organisation will have any open inventories that all users should be able to see or update and assign them the respective company-wide permissions. While you can delegate the 'delete' permission, this we consider this an anti-pattern within Assets. Ideally Assets retains the record of a decomissioned asset for archival purposes, and we generally recommend not deleting assets.
Consider the groups of users you will require within Assets. Groups allow inventory-based permissions to be applied to a group of users. You might have a general 'Sales' group that is allowed to read and update the 'Sales' inventory, with create and delete operations restricted to the 'Sales Administrators' group.
- Consider your group requirements and follow our guide on how to create groups to create your groups.
- Add permissions to your groups to allow group members to access inventories.
- Once you have added users to your company, you will be able to add them to their correct groups.
Increase Usability with Actions
Within Assets, highly repeated asset updates can be streamlined with Actions. An action is a preconfigured set of updates that can be made to an asset by either using a camera to scan a barcode, or by filling out a precreated form. This allows highly repeated actions, such as updating the state of an asset, changing its location, or filling in some time-sensitive metadata easy. This also allows for users to select from a preconfigured list of options when making a change, increasing the consistency of entries within your Assets asset register.
- Consider high-throughput changes that your assets may undergo. This might be a scenario where people borrow and return laptops on a daily basis, or where users temporarily change the state of something for a work task.
- For each of these high-throughput changes, create an action following our guide.
- Assign appropriate groups the permission to use the action.
- Provide the link to your action to your users. If they have access to the action and the asset, they can use their camera or enter the label of the asset to make the preconfigured changes. Any fields that require user input will need to be filled before the change will be processed.
Evolving Assets
At this point you should be onboarded into Assets. We are always looking to evolve our product and if you have any feedback or suggestions, please use the feedback widget within Assets, or email our support team support@assets.lapine.studio.