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HAM - Warranty Replacement/RMA asset best practices

Would appreciate feedback from Community on best practices for management of RMA assets, especially as it relates to linking them back to the purchase history of the original (now broken) asset.

While we once managed hardware replacements kind of like editing CI's (change serial of named server or storage device but leave the shell of the record alone), we eventually decided that we would create a new asset record and manually migrate over details of make, model, warranty, etc., from the old asset to the new asset.  We would then mark the broken asset as "retired" or "disposed", depending upon whether or not the asset was returned to the OEM under warranty.

Our current quandry is whether to also manually associate all the legacy purchase history of the old asset to the new: initial PO for purchase, several subsequent POs with maintenance renewals, and then chase down any licenses that referenced the old asset and manually relink them.

One issue that concerns me is that, in effect, you are modifying the initial purchase history when you do that.  Likewise, review of the renewal PO's would not show the serial of the replacement asset.

What do you consider best practices?

Also, would it be possible to submit an enhancement request to facilitate migration of some standard values from the old to the new asset - say "RMA replacement" button or option in the Asset module?

Thanks, David

(2) Replies

You have a few different options here.

First, you can link multiple Hardware Assets to a single PO Line.  Therefore, you could link the replacement Asset to the original purchase line and keep the original Asset that is disposed/retired linked up.  You now have both the original asset as well as the replacement asset linked to the original Purchase.  You could use this same approach to your purchase that are maintenance renewals against the original Hardware Asset.

You have some options in terms of linking together the Original/Replace asset as well:

1) For the original asset that is changed to a status of Retired/Disposed, update the Comments field and indicate that this was replaced under warranty and reference the new Asset Name with the Serial Number/Asset Tag.

2) Link the Replacement asset to the Original asset as a sub-asset.  On the Original Asset you can then go to the Sub-Assets tab and see the history.  On the Replacement Asset you can see the linkage through the "Master Asset" field.

3) Create a Custom Field for the Hardware Asset called "Replaced By", and in this field put the Serial Number (or some other identifier) of the replacement asset.

Howdy - my team has not yet provided any feedback, but I'll provide initial comments pending further review.

"First, you can link multiple Hardware Assets to a single PO Line. Therefore, you could link the replacement Asset to the original purchase line and keep the original Asset that is disposed/retired linked up."  When using Business Adapter Studio, I don't believe we have yet determined a way to have more than one asset per PO line.  This will require additional research on our part.

"For the original asset that is changed to a status of Retired/Disposed, update the Comments field and indicate that this was replaced under warranty and reference the new Asset Name with the Serial Number/Asset Tag."  This we currently do in comments as suggested, but comments do not result in a new asset record that inherits those critical attributes we mentioned.

"Link the Replacement asset to the Original asset as a sub-asset. On the Original Asset you can then go to the Sub-Assets tab and see the history. On the Replacement Asset you can see the linkage through the "Master Asset" field."  While we had not considered using the parent/child relationship, we already have an issue with the parent/child relationships that we currently manage: namely that the children don't inherit the warranty, etc., attributes from the parent.  These have to be copied down or otherwise still manually managed.

"Create a Custom Field for the Hardware Asset called "Replaced By", and in this field put the Serial Number (or some other identifier) of the replacement asset."  This seems attractive at first glance, except when we consider the number of times a given CI (say, switch with a CI name in CMDB) fails and is replaced.  We have some named CIs where the switch hardware has been replaced 4 times during the last year.

I *do* appreciate the recommendations, though.  And I'd still like to consider submission of an enhancement request to Engineering.

Best, David Mathias