What’s new in ServiceNow Washington DC - HAM

The Washington DC release brings you Hardware Asset Management 10.0.0, providing useful additions to the HAM application. We will highlight some of the most noteworthy changes in this blog...

...Such as the new HAM maturity capability, that allows you to measure the maturity of your HAM program. HAM also gives you the ability to track the Total Cost of Ownership of hardware assets, and an integration with the Lenovo warranty API to track warranty details of your Lenovo assets in ServiceNow. Furthermore, the enhanced licensing method for custom model categories.

HAM Maturity Overview for Improved Value

You can now measure the maturity of your HAM program and maximize value from your HAM implementation using the HAM maturity capabilities available within the HAM Success Portal. The HAM Success Portal categorizes your HAM program maturity into Crawl, Walk and Run stages and provides pre-defined/ready-made maturity items for each stage. The maturity items available for each maturity stage provide prescriptive guidance and recommended steps to take to fulfill the maturity requirements for the current stage, and also to reach the next maturity stage or level. The maturity items are pre-classified into maturity stages (Crawl, Walk and Run) but you can reclassify these items and move them across stages if necessary. You can link these maturity items to your existing HAM success goals (defined within the HAM Success Portal) to track progress through tangible goals.

For example, when you have just begin your HAM journey (Crawl stage), your focus would be on building a strong foundation which could involve activities like defining hardware models, identifying discovery tools to auto-populate the ServiceNow asset inventory, establishing processes and roles etc. Using the HAM Success Portal, you can now track your current maturity level/stage, understand the steps to improve the HAM program maturity and work on improving it through tangible and measurable success goals.

Source: Success portal view in Hardware Asset Workspace (servicenow.com) 

Asset Total Cost of Ownership

You can now track the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of hardware assets throughout their lifecycle. This enables better financial planning of your assets, and supports decision-making through insights into the asset procurement cost as well as the operational costs (including maintenance costs, support costs and disposal costs). Thus giving you visibility and control over the asset’s direct and indirect expenses throughout its lifecycle. You can also benchmark asset costs against other assets and against the hardware models to compare performance.

A hardware asset’s TCO is the sum of all the expenses that occurred on that asset during its lifecycle. Expense lines are automatically generated by ServiceNow, based on the costs incurred on the asset. To enable TCO calculation, ServiceNow HAM now supports task and labor rate cards. All ServiceNow HAM flows (e.g. hardware asset refresh, hardware asset disposal and more) generate tasks that need to be completed in order to complete the flow/process. For each task generated, ServiceNow can now capture the time worked on the task. After a task is closed, ServiceNow HAM can calculate and generate expense lines based on the time worked on the task and the labor rate defined in the rate cards. It is also possible to apply a flat rate for a task for calculation and generation of expense lines. Similarly, incidents affecting hardware assets already include task rate cards that can generate expense lines. Expense lines generated overall are used for calculating the TCO of an asset.

HAM Licensing for Custom Model Categories

ServiceNow HAM licensing already allows you to choose/opt in to the HAM resources/asset categories that you want to use and manage within ServiceNow HAM. You can save money by opting in and paying only for the resources/asset categories that you want to use and manage within ServiceNow HAM. Think of, for example, End User Computers, Servers, and more. These resource categories are linked to model categories in the HAM application that control the creation of assets and Cis, and provide more granular categorization of HAM resources. Starting with Washington DC, any hardware asset with a custom model category can access HAM features and workflows only if the custom model category mapped in the asset is associated with a licensable and opted-in resource category.

For example, if you have a custom model category for audio-visual devices that is mapped against your audio-visual hardware assets, your audio-visual hardware assets will be able to access ServiceNow HAM features and workflows. But only if the audio-visual custom model category mapped in the assets is associated with a licensable and opted-in HAM resource category (e.g. End User Computers).

Integration with Lenovo Warranty API

You can now get the warranty details of your Lenovo hardware assets in ServiceNow HAM through the integration with Lenovo Warranty API. These warranty details can be fetched through the Lenovo Warranty API (from the Lenovo site). To understand assets for which warranties are nearing expiration, they can be tracked from a central location in the ServiceNow Asset Operations view of the Hardware Asset Workspace.

Onboarding of Hardware Products using Application Portfolio Management

The ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management (APM) module already provides a framework known as Technology Reference Model (TRM), that enables you to maintain a list of products with information on their approval of use within the organization. The TRM library within an organization is managed by enterprise architects and used by application owners. Each product in the TRM library is associated with a set of lifecycle phases that could be approved, approved with constraints, unapproved, under evaluation etc. This can help you understand if a product is approved for use or not, and also onboard new products using a central standard framework.

The ServiceNow APM TRM framework can now be used with ServiceNow HAM to allow application owners to request hardware products to be used within the organization, onboard the products, define TRM lifecycle phases and maintain the TRM library. The TRM lifecycle phases can also be viewed for all normalized hardware models associated with a product to understand which models and products are approved for use within the organization.