 Yeah, excited to kind of kick things off. I guess I'll do a mini intro. I've been that with just tech for three years now in the manage managing the support team. So kind of the day to day in regards to the help desk tickets coming in and things like that. And just keeping track of inventory management and other other critical systems and trying to make make sure things flow smoothly for for kind of end clients. Miguel go ahead and do a little intro on your side. Sure, my name is Miguel Castillo and I work as the, excuse me, a tech support specialist at just tag for seven years now. I basically enjoy the, the idea of investigating, especially their solving problem solving and the various network environments of our clients. And outside of that, just a quick thing I enjoy hiking listening to music, great and proud dad 19 year old. Thank you. Hi everyone, my name is Blair Sordetto I am the current operations manager at New York legal assistance group. So I handle everything all of the administration operations facilities and technology for office. We have a staff of over 400 people and a few offsite offices as well. My background is actually in music so I come from like house management from performance venues and event production as well. Right. So a little bit on the agenda side. I'll try not to read the slide but kind of just in the direction that we're kind of going through just a little explanation on what is inventory management kind of from our perspective and some of the knowledge that we've kind of discovered along our ways. I think it's important how, how we kind of use it and potential tools to consider. And we'll kind of talk a lot about me as simple as an Excel worksheet to actual applications and services that you can pay for to help help keep things and tracking items as well. And kind of ideas as to when, when we think it's important to use it as well. So I guess to kick things off we do have a poll. So I guess, Shelley if you want to run that. So the poll questions here. So just to kind of get a base of seeing where people might be. And if you don't have any kind of inventory practices currently at the moment. Just focusing major, mostly on laptops desktops or servers. If you have kind of laptop desktop server hardware but then kind of other hardware as well. And then if you are kind of tracking everything in regards to hardware software and even files and data and things like that. Tim, those polls don't seem to be functioning. So if we could just have people put in the chat what they're using. Okay. No problem. Okay. Do we want to give a little time for that or jump to the next one as people type in. I think people can continue putting in what are you doing for inventory management currently, and we'll continue on. Okay. Over here. Yeah. So we'll start with question why is inventory management important. And we'll go over the following four reasons as to why cost saving on boarding off boarding audit reporting to funders and security. At this time I'll talk about cost saving. So we all know that within the nonprofit world, finding ways to save is crucial. But this reason implementing and maintaining an inventory system. So important as you build it. You'll notice that you'll be able to use it as a tool for planning ahead. So to be clear, once you know what you have, you will then be able to analyze what items you need to be replaced due to age. And then from there you can decipher what budget you need for the upcoming fiscal year to replace with your. So by having this figure in mind, even if it's just an estimated ballpark, your team can then work on grant funding fundraising. And you can use that by planning. You will find yourself in a position to find those devices, excuse me, in both versus purchasing items on an as needed basis, and tech resellers to provide hefty discounts. One makes such a purchase. In return, this will help save your organization a great deal. Another reason why inventory management is important is in regards to onboarding and off boarding staff. So it's really helpful to keep track of knowing what inventory you have on hand or in stock for your new hires. So we're talking about laptops, phones, headsets, that type of thing. Who has what devices and where they are? Does the staff have it in hand? Does it live in an offsite office? Where are the devices living? And finally, knowing what needs to be returned when someone leaves the organization is all very helpful to keep track of. So when you have an accurate inventory, you're able to better plan for unique situations or accommodations. So some examples would be like standing desks for medical accommodations or maybe there's a special software that someone needs to have downloaded on their computer, able to keep track of all of that. So in regards to some of the auditing and reporting for funders, we have definitely ran into request where the funder may reach back out and say, I would like a report as to kind of where the funds have were spent in regards to a grant or things like that. So being able to kind of easily access a inventory system. And again, whether it's Excel and actual tracking, sorry, I have a fly flying around me, whether it is just as simple as an Excel sheet or something in SharePoint. I think I saw a couple of people mentioning the actual platforms as well. Kind of really whatever works for your organization, being able to easily pull a report as to when you purchase the certain group of computers and being able to pull that and send it back to the funder and saying these are the devices we purchase, these are where they're being used. We have found that to be a lot easier when requested, being able to just easily export that out. And kind of elaborating a little bit on what Miguel was mentioning. It has, it does help for when the equipment, when you're looking to get new equipment, you can kind of pull reports on when hardware is going to be kind of reaching its age of end of life, being able to justify some of the costs for new equipment and things like that. And, and again, kind of what Blair was touching on, like, if there are an uptick in headphones needed or docking stations and other things and laptop chargers being able to know different general patterns that you can kind of keep tabs and tracks on. And that could just be even adding a little note or to occur in certain inventory device and stuff like that. And I guess diving right into the security aspect. I mean, security is obviously a big thing these days and and it really just ranges from not only just tracking the hardware but just tracking like really everything in the orb you could trying to make sure that you're understanding where your data is being used and accessed from and stuff like that. So could probably talk on security at a broader scheme but just kind of keeping it a little more focused on the inventory management. I mean, we've been just keeping a very track of devices that gone missing or potentially stolen, which hopefully doesn't happen a whole lot. So just knowing that those devices had certain measures put in place and having the tracking system being okay we can that one we can mark as it as being stolen. We know that things like bit locker and drive encryption and stuff like that were were in place and just being able to track that and and have reassurances is always is always good to good to do overall. And just in the sense of tracking things and a lot of times you might have to work with like your, your it vendor whether it's in house or out of house but if there if you were in ran into a scenario where you were part of like an attack vector of some kind, just knowing where things are, like you have certain printers and switches and and servers at different branch offices and stuff like that. I think not worrying about what's where just having it all into a system has really helped us a lot and just being able to really track everything. And you can go as far as knowing the who has access to what. So you can kind of track the people and okay these these group of people have access to these devices and stuff like that so you can get really granular, or you can really just keep it to the basics again. One of the an org preference, but we have found in the security sense that being able to really get down to the details and track as much as we can has helped us a lot. Overall, and even as far as like applications from a security standpoint just getting out of the hardware entirely and just touching on the application side. Like if you have critical business type applications and, and again tracking who has access to what, what kind of admin level permissions they might have, as well as even just things like updates and patches that making sure you're staying on top of those things. And that can all be part of the inventory tracking overall. Just kind of pairing the hardware to kind of what Blair mentioned about staff onboarding and onboarding, as well as even just application stuff like that it can all be kind of lumped under kind of an inventory type tracking aspect overall. Right. So we're here for the next poll question. Has an auditor comment commented on your inventory management. You can chat us your responses, it's either yes, no, or what's in order to expand. Great. So, when to use inventory management will touch base on these topics budgeting planning and procurement staff onboarding reassignment and off boarding and moving equipment and setting up new equipment. So, as Miguel mentioned earlier, having an accurate inventory also assists for budgeting for any type of purchasing for new equipment and updates, and especially if we're able to keep track of purchasing dates warranty dates stuff like that. Regarding planning, any consistency and predictability you can add to the onboarding and off boarding process is really helpful for all the teams involved. Knowing what assets you have on hand in advance of start and end dates helps to better meet these deadlines, because your communication and preparation have the space to happen in a predictable amount of time. For example, in my situation, all the communication is liaised between HR it and administration. So I communicate to each team what needs to be done and when and also reach out to the staff member that's affected and make sure to communicate their return or pickup of technology and other items. The ideal scenarios would be to have all the equipment and software prepared and ready by the time the new hire starts or firstly when someone leaves that the technology can be easily returned and or shut off immediately after their term is ended. So touching a little bit more on the staff kind of onboarding and off boarding. We kind of used, we implemented kind of Microsoft forms as a way that have been working pretty well. You can kind of link the form to a flow and the flow can trigger certain aspects of notifying certain people. You can have the flow actually trigger an email to get approval before the flow continues to to proceed through the next steps and notify other people. There's different aspects that you can really do in regards to kind of the forms and flows and there's lots of other tools. So don't don't always I don't necessarily recommend it. I think there's different options across the board. And even on if for for a company that is using like Google workspace, there's definitely options under that umbrella as well. We have found it very helpful being able to kind of track just simple things like the staff and what they need in regards to like docking stations again. If they'll need certain licenses and 365 for a Visio or project and little things that you can kind of adjust the form as you go. So one of the most helpful check boxes to to make sure that to try to avoid missing little things and making sure that the account, once it's set up. You don't have to go back and try to tweak things overall. So that has helped us a lot over. So I'll talk now about reassigning and authority equipment, as well as moving and setting up. So once staff person these the organization of devices are returned, and then eventually reassigned to the next employee. But I didn't want to paint a scenario where, for example, equipment has been purchased. And so there is this older computer older laptop that a super might have had. And give them a new one. And as we saw that formers then reassign to the same intern. So that is one scenario where reassigning takes place. Another way to look at this is, if now they have the equipment and that older equipment you see that it really does not work. If it doesn't work properly then we know that at that point, it's best to recycle. If it's still good enough, but within your age limit of your devices. It's already surpassed that, but it's still functioning of course, you can always decide to donate. The main thing here that I want to point out is, no matter which scenario is happening within the organization, all of this has to be recorded in your inventory. And it's ideal, because even let's say the items are being donated or recycled, and you're removing them from the inventory. I can mention for me as an example with one system that I use, I can dispose of the items that are no longer on my inventory list but they haven't been permanently removed. So if for auditing reasons as I need that information, I can always have a backup. Now, when it comes to off boarding old equipment. For mine I can say that once you have purchased the equipment as a result of planning ahead and budgeting like I mentioned earlier on. The next step would then be you know contacting your cycle company to pick up the items. You can also shred your hard drives for those older computers because as we know, there's a lot of confidential information. And you can always get a certificate as a result confirming the destruction. And I'll just repeat with having an inventory system, even if it's just removing from your company. You still want to have that as a record in case you get audited with moving equipment. As Tim mentioned earlier, having the form will help to know what equipment is needed. And from my experience is best practice to have created as early as possible with an effective date. That allows the IT department to do the whole process of whether it's going to be physically moving something. But most importantly, updating the inventory. So if there are a number of moves, something that we've done is try to scheduling them on the same date. If there's too many for one days and scheduling back to back days. The idea is to create a smooth process. Make it as efficient as possible. So moving and setting up new equipment. The tool, the inventory management tool will be extremely useful because you'll be able to check beforehand what equipment you have in that location, whether if it's available, or even when it will be available. And then if you see that you don't have certain equipment, you know what needs to be brought in to that location. It also allows you to analyze all of your devices. And if you happen to have asset tax, which you can use with an asset management system that have the identifying number and just make it easier to track. To, as I was mentioning earlier, find what that location has, you'll be able to find that in minutes and you're asking using that type of system. In the case where new equipment is being set up and you need to plan accordingly to create names for each device and end or asset tag to identify. These are new equipment. Computers, as an example. You can be able to add them on to the inventory as well. The idea is, you're always updating inventory because the more up to date it is the easier it is for you to plan ahead to strategize as there's new equipment you need for, let's say the next fiscal year. The information that you take down for your inventory can, you know, it all depends on you, but usually the main is making model serial number. And so I'll just end that with an inventory management system, you can usually make a hand help with it as well. And that will make the process of recording. All these transactions these moves and setting up a lot easier, and you can then upload onto the system through the hand. So we have our next poll question. How does your organization do inventory management. Do you use commercial asset tracking software. An example of that may be asset cloud. Do you use general software used for tracking so something like Excel or SharePoint SharePoint lists. Do you use paper or sticky notes. I don't know, or we do not keep inventory. And I know that question is a little similar to the one before. I think the one before was actually more asking like what type of items you actually do track. So if you already did clarify like Excel or an asset tracking system, by all means maybe share some of the things that you do focus on tracking in regards to hardware and or other items like that. So, how to do inventory management will go for two ways, a system based approach and the magic here on the screen you see a screenshot of an example of inventory management system called the asset cloud. This happens to be the main view or main tab called view assets. Using such a system allows to enter in as many different asset types. And then within that you can give each device an asset tag to identify each device and then include the site and it's you have different branches the location was the current assigned person. And so the thing is the data purchase which is always important and they to replace, if you have a five year limit and put that that that will show that will help you be able to track your devices better. What is also helpful is that you can continue to enter new assets, as you continue to purchase items. Again, like I said earlier again, I just want to repeat it. If you have items that are being recycled. You're able to dispose of them from any of the management systems. In this case, I have been to use as the cloud. So now that I've spoken how asset cloud in no way I just want to make sure I'm not recommending it to the system like I said I've used and just wanted to share some example. I'll do a quick mention of other examples of inventory software case you would like to do the search on them. Some examples are fishbowl inventory. Zero with an axe axe hero. Web agility. WB has a boy agility GI light by acid panda and so ho inventory to be. At the same time, I'll let you know that there does exist a more advanced software where geo locations. And this is built into your devices bios so that you can track the asset even if it's reform. So in other words, if someone steals it, or this place and someone else takes it reformat it. You can go to tracking. In such examples of that type of software, our absolute cart graph, that's CRT, then graph GRKPH, go codes, geo CODS, and clear path GPS. These type of systems will be more expensive, but worth looking into. Lastly, if your organization realizes purchasing inventory management software is outside of your budget, there is the manual approach to each layer. Great. Thanks, Miguel. So I saw in the chat a lot of folks do use Excel. So this may be very familiar to you. I use a combination of SharePoint lists and Excel, which you can see a couple different screen grabs of on the slide. So when I started at NYLAG almost three years ago, I was very organized, organized myself with lists and sticky notes and journals, and very quickly realized that with our organization's expansion and the sheer amount of people I had to simultaneously on board, off board and move every week, sometimes upwards of 20 people every week. In addition to my other responsibilities was just simply too much to keep track of in my little head. Because a lot of this information is not all available at one time, you're just like as the information comes in piece mailing it. So there's just constant updating through each stage. Now I have switched over and I use a combination of Microsoft SharePoint lists and Excel as my checklists for these processes. And they're much more helpful because now you can easily see a visualization of the progress of each process. So the existing checklist for admin staff was virtually non-existent. Basically, there would just be an email announcement from HR. They would add the nameplate and the mailbox and that was pretty much it. There was really like no way to double check what happened when it was completed or, you know, since then we've had many other types of assets to keep track of. We've mentioned docking stations, laptops, phones, merchandise, there's just so much more to keep track of. So having these checklists has now dramatically increased consistency in setting up equipment or obtaining equipment on loan which ultimately not only saves money in the long run, but more importantly helps to improve the workload efficiency of staff because they know what's happening, when it's happening, when to expect these changes. And most importantly, all of this information is in one centralized location. What's great about using SharePoint lists and Excel is that you can also sort and filter depending on what your needs are at the time, which I was not easily able to do with sticky notes. And you can also easily share these lists and collaborate with others based on your needs. Next slide, please. So as you may have been able to tell by the past two slides, I'm a very color coordinated person, I'm a very visual person. And so, when I created my SharePoint lists, I reflect that. So this way, if I want to look at the list on a macro scale, as you can kind of see in the smaller screenshot on the right, I can easily see if something's about to fall through the cracks, and I can follow up on it, or I can just go through the profile for each person and update each action item. As I mentioned, since I'm the intermediary between HR, IT and administration, I make sure that all of the operations related items are accounted for. So in our case that includes like mailbox assignment locations, ID badges, you know, have they been added to various internal lists, we have like seniority lists, eating lists, notary lists, you know, have they been invited to onboarding, orientations, tours, you know, are they getting a laptop, what brand are they getting, do they need any additional equipment setup or software downloaded other licenses. And finally, have they been added to that Excel spreadsheet that you saw earlier that the administrative staff access. So this information, as I previously mentioned before is not always available all at one time. And so if you're like me and you have multiple groups of onboarding multiple people every week, having this checklist that you can easily update with the Excel step is super helpful, and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks, and everything has been communicated to whom it needs to. Next slide please. So for offboarding, very similar process, the only difference is the list of action items. And again for operations relations thing this includes like removing the name tags from the desks removing their mailbox assignments, making sure their IDs are deactivated, are they removed from all of those lists we talked about earlier. Making sure did we get return of it equipment on loan. So again laptops headsets printers thumb drives all of that. And finally, making sure they're removed from any internal systems. So for example, at our organization, we have a conference room reservation system. And so I just make sure that everyone's accounts are deleted once they've exited the organization. And again, have we added all of this information to that centralized location that the administrative staff have access to and their checklist that they sign off on. So everything color coded is super helpful for me. But what's great is that you can customize SharePoint list however you want the information to be presented to you. So they have pull down list bubbles long answers tax, whatever you need that suitable for your organizational style preference. One thing that I'll just add to to players I mean, a lot of our focus and and I think really anything that saves time these days is automation. So I think that as you kind of build out these different checklist and are are seeing different things in regards just as an example of like the off boarding and finding ways to automate things to say okay. I have to go into this particular portal to check if the account was deleted. How can I maybe automate it so it's it's once they deleted from one source it gets purged from all sources. So it can really kind of flag things like that that has and finding ways to really automate the off boarding as much as possible, which is, which is key and something that we really look for. Right in this next section will speak on how to do inventory management. Just want to make sure you can hear me okay. Yep, you're good. Okay, good. So to start with, it's up the most important to create and keep an inventory of organizations with as detailed as possible. If you ask why it's very simple if you don't know what you have. How can you begin to identify areas of concern and where replacements are needed. As I said, I'm going to speak CIS security control one, but before I go any further, my just wanted to clarify what CIS is defined as and it's, it's an organization called the Center for Internet Security, and this organization created this control one to serve as a standard guide to best track the organization's progress to the purpose of maintaining an organization as secure as possible. So within this guideline and exercises and actively managing and by manage I mean inventory track and correct all enterprise assets connected to the infrastructure physically, virtually remotely and those within cloud environments to actively know the totality of your assets that need to be monitored and protected within the enterprise. I also want to clarify that enterprise assets also include end user devices, including portable and mobile. And of course network devices servers. Why CIS security control is critical is because an organization can't defend what they don't know what they have. Having a managed control of your assets will assist to secure monitor securely monitor what you have, plus will help make your organization in response to data breach and cyber attacks for efficient plus creating such an inventory based on these guidelines will help support your organization in identifying an authorized and managed assets to possibly it will also allow to detect any missing assets. And as we all know, any missing assets can put your station and rescue. So in regards to change management. As I mentioned when I started there really wasn't much of an inventory management in place, other than computers and laptops. But now that we have so much more inventory and staff numbers to keep track of requires the use of a management system or in my case a combined use of multiple management systems. Without it steps would be missed and overall the process was very inconsistent and slow. I did develop a new checklist system for myself as well as the administrative staff I mentioned earlier. This also meant that I had to retrain the entire administrative staff on how to standardize how hires, moving and exits all occurred. It is now a step by step process inclusive of a signed off checklist. We also do have regular check ins to make sure that the process fits with their daily workload. The process is being completed in a timely manner, and most importantly that they know what to expect and when, and we can make adjustments as necessary. The most important aspect of all of this is that all of the pertinent information is in one centralized location for easy access and reference, as opposed to little emails here and there that you're trying to dig out. Thank you. And another way to do inventory management is listed here is barcody by using barcode reader. I know that I've used it some clients, especially on Excel spreadsheets. I've been able to scan barcodes of devices with a basic reader. And while it doesn't record all the information you need, but at least at that moment recall with this specific place, at least the fact that it recorded the serial numbers needed faster for me to complete. Well, today you can still purchase a simple barcode reader like that that's connected to your machine. But, like I said, the downside, it's not going to give you all the info. So today get barcode readers that are have to build these. And along with reading barcodes, they can also read QR codes as well. And I don't know, Tim, would you be able to go back to slide down for a second to show sample. And so there's an example of the QR code to the square image. And what's, you know, great about the QR card that I can hold a lot of information. Well, with most infant or management systems, you're also able to purchase and help like your software. And I know for me, when I use it, I'm able to scan the ass attack of the device, which isn't a barcode form. And then from there, I can look up the information I may need on the spot. If I'm setting up the equipment that want to enter in the details, especially if I'm unpacking at a different location from my office, I can go ahead. Yes, at the beginning, you'll have to put in an asset number and some other information, but it will record the serial number. And what's great about it is that within seconds, you can upload that onto your system than any other information they need. You can add that your desk. When I've used the handheld. It's been very helpful. The area where I feel that it would be, it would be more perfecting and scanning the QR codes. I found myself at times, having issues scanning. Not always because of the hand out of life. I've had issues with manufacturers. The QR code is kind of not printed that clearly and so they can harder to scan. And then at other times, I had to configure the handheld. There are ways to configure them to be able to read certain codes. And at times it's worked in other times it has. And I think Miguel you have worked with the, like the smartphone app as well as like an alternative to correct the handheld. That's true. Yeah, that using the smartphone app has also helped me in situations where I didn't have the handheld with me or at times when I was going home and I realized something. I wanted to enter that info. Okay. So some little, I guess lessons from the field, just kind of touching on some some different things and I know a good amount of people mentioned in the chat about the Excel files. And one of the examples that I that I've worked on recently was a client that had multiple offices. And we had an Excel sheet where different options within the sheet. Each office had access to the sheet and they would update their own kind of location within the sheet and different different tabs within Excel. And the naming conventions were all different because we're all we're all humans and we all have our own style. So we all pick our different things. So one of the things that we did change that I felt helped a lot was making dropdowns in the Excel sheet rather than relying on someone to spell a word right or or pick the word commissioned versus retired or new versus old and whatever. So making the dropdowns where it could apply and just setting it to pick one of these five options as this computer was retired and that's it. It avoid definitely avoided and has helped with just human air and and things like that. So the dropdowns and naming conventions overall helped a lot with being able to track across these different locations for this particular client. And with the different equipment at kind of the different local offices and stuff. Again, just kind of standardizing it so that if certain making sure that some fields are marked as like required even so. So we know that we're getting the correct information like a serial number that's usually pretty critical when it comes to seeking out support via the the vendor and stuff like that. So just making sure that there's some fields that are highlighted as kind of required as well as dropdowns for other fields to to make sure that there's less mixing of words and errors overall. So something that's been really helpful for us using this inventory management system is you can learn about general trends and what's happening to your assets. For example, in our organization, there were laptop chargers that were being lost pretty frequently. And so we were able to pull reports and you could see the general trends and you could kind of know it down like okay it's you know in our case it was like one specific unit that was losing them more than the others. So I was able to use that data and information and educate the users, and now it's all been resolved and that's something that I wouldn't have been able to easily track before. I can talk about another example with DVD drives, we were checking out DVD drives external DVD drives pretty frequently. And we again notice that there is a general trend that it was happening more often that there is clearly a high demand for it so we were able to take that information and that data and used it to purchase a bunch of these external drives that we then put into all of the conference rooms, which just raises the customer service level for all of the staff and makes everyone much happier. And so from my end, what I find, I noticed I'm hearing so sorry, I'm sure I'm getting back down. From my end, I've noticed that using an inventory, whether it's manual approach or systems based approach. I like the scenario that Blair mentioned with laptop chargers missing. If you do not have an idea of what you have. The scenario that could come next would be person that's a returning laptop because they're last day today. And they tell you, oh, don't have, you know, I lost my laptop charger and you happen to know that you're using that laptop for someone else coming in next week, you're about to reassign it. You're going to have another charger so then you're going to be forced to purchase another charger that hasn't as needed basis, as I was mentioning earlier. Now, if you are able to have some type of inventory, you know what you have, you can then plan ahead, along with that old purchase you can buy a few extra in case of an emergency like that. And that will definitely help cut costs for your organization in the foreground. Another example that I didn't want to use is that there was a time when we were getting a lot of requests for lonely portable DVD drives. This is a players organization. And so I happen to include these, it wasn't there weren't a lot of them. I would include them in the asset system. And then what I started to do as a practice was checking that in and checking about whatever people requested. When I then discover that Tim and Blair were talking about this, I did a report in the asset system, NASA cloud, and was able to see that, yes, the, the request for increasing. At that point we decided to make this process more smooth. Let's just order these DVD players put them in the focus rooms where employees can then reserve the space and have access, as opposed to every person coming and knocking at the office, knocking on the door, and working with other people at the same time. So, that said, I mean, I think having some form of inventory system will greatly benefit your organization. It will keep it, it will be definitely it is a key to keeping your budget healthy, and as well keeping your office secure devices that you have. Not to scare anyone but it's, it's good for everyone to be aware, you know, that external attackers are always looking for devices that are not protected to the easy way into organizations. And they infiltrate through those devices and by the time you notice they've been there already. Any dive into some Q&A, feel free to chat if you have any questions.