Are your school's asset management policies breaking the bank?
Businesses employ adults who generally work in an office on a fairly fixed schedule. And businesses have a hard time keeping track of their physical assets.
Now think about schools. Consider the large, complex, open-ended environment of today’s educational institutions. Staffs include teachers and administrators, support staff, part-time and volunteer workers. And they serve hundreds and thousands of students who aren’t employees - and may not take asset control very seriously.
Miami Public Schools in northeastern Oklahoma faced this dilemma head on as it dealt with its IT asset management issues. The district’s solution involved an integrated approach that let it allocate resources effectively so that students – not equipment – had the highest priority.
Using the
MobileAsset asset-tracking solution from Wasp Barcode Technologies, the district
reduced its audit time by 93 percent.
Time Constraints and Textbook Control
Time and textbooks: two big problems for today’s educators. Tracking assets takes up valuable teacher and staff time, interfering with the primary job of educating. Barcode technology:
- Simplifies asset management
- Ensures accuracy, and
- Minimizes the time required.
Keeping labels in a standard location speeds the process, and handheld scanners facilitate fast inventory counts. Inventories can then be conducted using portable equipment at the assets’ sites.
And for the many schools that aren’t handing out iPads to students, textbooks have a very high value, and need careful monitoring. Barcoding technology accelerates the entire process, from issuing texts to students to recovering them at the end of the term.
Inventory controls identify shortages during each school’s hiatus, which makes necessary re-ordering fast and efficient.
Asset-Tracking a Constant Battle
School administrators face the never-ending challenge of always knowing the whereabouts of assets that are issued to students for use outside of the classroom. So check-out and return procedures can be time-consuming, and it’s easy for some equipment to fall through the cracks. Students may also claim to have returned units that they still possess.
Barcode technology solves both problems. It dramatically speeds up the mechanics involved in loaners. And the school’s records pertaining to the whereabouts of its property are more credible and accurate. Maybe you are tracking software licenses for programs issued for use among students or teachers. The average business-issued PC carries, on average, $400 of
unused software (a staggering $12.3 Billion nationwide).
As we saw in the Miami Public Schools case study, most
grant awards include requirements for asset tracking and management. Barcode technology can tie each asset directly to its funding source to streamline the required reporting.
The Bottom Line: $$$
School districts these days have enormous stores of portable assets: IT and audio-visual equipment, as well as a wide variety of school property that students take home. Many districts have policies that allow their students to check out (and return) computer notebooks and tablets, books, musical instruments, sports equipment and uniforms, etc. These items represent enormous investments that must be managed and accounted for on a daily basis.
And it’s not just the assets that walk out of the school that need tracking. Think of all of the school property that’s located within the school buildings themselves that never leaves, things like desks and chairs and expensive lab equipment. These items inevitably get moved around during classes, and it’s often difficult to discern where they were belong.
Barcoding makes more sense than any other solutions in these cases. It creates permanent, durable labels on items that won’t fall off like masking tape or other types of labels would.
Wasp Solutions Provide Peace of Mind, Confidence
If your school district is struggling with the management and inventory control of its assets – or the implementation of technology in general – you can still register through June 17 for the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE)
Annual Conference and Exposition in San Antonio, Texas, June 23-26, 2013. We would love to see you there!
Whether or not you can attend, we invite you to explore the educational asset management and inventory control solutions that Wasp Barcode Technologies offers. We manufacture numerous hardware and software solutions that can help school districts economize – both on time and in their budgets – and minimize replacement costs. These downloadable
demos and YouTube videos can help you see how Wasp solutions can give you more confidence in your school’s critical asset management and inventory control functions.
Time Constraints and Textbook Control
Time and textbooks: two big problems for today’s educators. Tracking assets takes up valuable teacher and staff time, interfering with the primary job of educating. Barcode technology:
School administrators face the never-ending challenge of always knowing the whereabouts of assets that are issued to students for use outside of the classroom. So check-out and return procedures can be time-consuming, and it’s easy for some equipment to fall through the cracks. Students may also claim to have returned units that they still possess.
Barcode technology solves both problems. It dramatically speeds up the mechanics involved in loaners. And the school’s records pertaining to the whereabouts of its property are more credible and accurate. Maybe you are tracking software licenses for programs issued for use among students or teachers. The average business-issued PC carries, on average, $400 of 
If your school district is struggling with the management and inventory control of its assets – or the implementation of technology in general – you can still register through June 17 for the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE)