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Inventory Automation with the Help of ServiceNow

Discover more about ServiceNow, a cloud-based platform for streamlining and automating business IT services. With its capability to simplify basic and complex processes, ServiceNow is an invaluable asset.

Our experts, Andreea Domide and Blanka Nagy (ServiceNow Business Analysts) have crafted this informative article, which was previously featured in the March 2024 issue of Today Software Magazine.

Inventory Automation with the Help of ServiceNow

Automation is a hot topic in many work discussions, which encapsulates the desire for increased efficiency. If we listen closely to most office discussions, they capture the desire for efficiently conducted tasks. But what does automation mean? 

Automation represents an effective way of making processes within a specific system work with little to no human interaction. In other words, its purpose is to make our lives easier. A useful example would be to automate a recurring simple task to free an employee from performing repetitive or manual work.  

There are countless ways on the market to support the automation process, but in this article, we focus on ServiceNow. This cloud-based workflow automation platform helps define, manage, automate, and structure IT services for companies. The platform efficiently automates simple and complex processes. 

While we won’t be able to cover everything that ServiceNow is capable of in this article, we would like to take you on an automation success journey. 

How to deliver an effective implementation with ServiceNow 

Our client’s business requirements were to obtain a regulations-compliant asset management that can be easily created, updated, and maintained accurately. 

The development team has created an application in the client’s ServiceNow instance for inventory purposes, which covered the process from two perspectives: 

  • The Inventory Assets – All the assets (e.g., furniture, kitchen appliances, miscellaneous fixed items, office supplies) that need to be scanned in the system during the inventory process. 

  • The Location of the Assets – Office location with all the furniture assigned to separate rooms and a dedicated assistant to complete the inventory process. 

The assets were labeled in different models to aid with their management and to create an easy-to-follow hierarchical structure. It was designed to be highly precise, addressing even the smallest details, including consumables. 

For enhanced asset management and a better user experience when creating and updating the existing assets, we used a ServiceNow tool called Mobile Agent, which conveniently provides mobility taking into consideration functionalities that are required by the business. 

ServiceNow Mobile Agent is a mobile application developed for service agents or technicians using the ServiceNow platform. It allows users to manage incidents, service requests, and other service management tasks directly from their mobile devices. Agents can quickly respond to customer requests and perform their administrative activities in real-time, regardless of their location. 

ServiceNow Mobile Agent can access cameras, location services, and more, thus facilitating field service agent tasks to save time, money, and resources. 

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In our case, the customised Mobile Agent helps fulfill the process by tracking the assets via Barcode Scanning. Simply put, the assets can be scanned in the physical rooms and the barcode is matched to the asset in ServiceNow, inserting or updating it accordingly. 

Diving into the technical details 

The custom application has a structured list of buildings and assets, with each room in the building having multiple allocated assets. This way, the person responsible for the inventory will have a comprehensive list of all the items they need to track.  

ServiceNow sits on top of a large defined table infrastructure that stores all the data within a ServiceNow instance. 

Additionally, the individual data record about a physical object is called an Asset and the tables that contain them are Asset Classes. 

To have the item list, the development team tailored multiple tables to handle this use case. 

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Figure 1. Created by the authors: Assets hierarchy and dependent Choices 

Figure 1. showcases that the root of the hierarchy is the Interior Class, from which stems 3 new child Asset Classes (e.g., furniture, room extras, and kitchen). Next up, additional Child Classes (e.g., desk, seat, and locker) have been created to generate granularity in terms of types of assets and allow for better data visualisation and asset management. 

To keep track of the inventory process, each session is kept in a table called Inventory. When a session is created in the system, a button is made available to automatically populate the list of stockrooms and assets that need to be verified.  

To open an Inventory session, an assistant must be assigned and from there, multiple rooms can be defined, moving the session as work in progress. These rooms are the digital equivalent of physical spaces where assets can be located. 

The complete inventory status can be achieved when all the assets within the rooms have been scanned and marked as completed. In the situation that the designated assistant attempts to manually set the inventory to complete before the scanning is finalised, an error message appears that states there are still rooms left to be actioned.  

Each room has an assigned assistant that needs to scan the assets belonging to that room. To complete the task, an ITIL role is required for the assistant in ServiceNow. The ITIL role in this use case is meant to provide the user with the necessary access, from a fulfiller’s point of view. 

It’s important to ensure the Mobile Agent App is installed on the smartphone, so the assistant can log in and start the verification process by scanning the assets. Once scanned, the asset’s session state can be updated with one of the following: 

  • Found: the asset is found in the correct room. 

  • Moved in or Moved out: found in another room than the assistant is assigned to. In this case, the system adds the asset to the correct room and sets its state to Moved in. In the room the asset was originally added to by the system, it will have the state Moved out. 

  • Missing: not found anywhere during the session. 

  • Removed: the asset was removed from use during the inventory process 

Additionally, the State, Substate, Stockroom (Location), and Assigned information can be updated in the displayed asset form within the mobile application and the process is completed when all rooms are checked using the Mobile Agent App. 

Solution review 

The purpose of automation so far has been to improve efficiency and streamline the user experience across processes within a company resulting in better time management. 

The value derived from this implementation revolves mainly around increased efficiency and enhanced user journey. The initial process required manual input and was time-consuming, which was now significantly reduced to 2 or 3 hours needed to do an inventory of 200 assets.  

As presented in the use case above, it can be verified that with ServiceNow we were able to leave our imprint in fulfilling our client’s needs. The solution succeeds in providing better data management, tracking all the inventory changes in real-time into a set of unified tables. 

With the possibility of creating numerous custom applications, there is no foreseeable limit to how far we could go with automating complex processes.