Understanding Exception Management
Assets specific to Information Technology (IT), such as computers, are able to describe themselves via network messages. These messages are stored in the third-party inventory database. Matching these network messages to assets in the asset repository is a process that compares assets in the asset repository to inventory retrieved from the field. The comparison process (IT_RECON_RUN) generates a list of discrepancies or exceptions.
PeopleSoft IT Asset Management automates a portion of IT asset activity by comparing the databases, asset by asset, and determining which changes need to be brought to the attention of a manager. Many IT assets differ day by day and for asset management purposes, you compare a very small group of key attributes in each asset record. While some of the attributes you track can also change day by day, PeopleSoft provides business rules to manipulate what is compared and ultimately presented for reconciliation.
Exceptions between the asset repository and the third-party inventory database are stored in discrepancy transaction tables. The exceptions are displayed in a component that allows you to sort, display on certain assets, group, and act on the changes that are required for those assets to bring them into balance. There is a suggested action associated with each exception, as defined in the business rule, and that action is presented once you have defined the assets that should be corrected. Once that action set is submitted, online or batch processing applies the predefined actions, and routes, updates the ARM, or notifies persons of interest, or a combination of those actions.
To ensure that the most pressing exceptions are handled quickly, ITAM provides an automatic reconciliation option that allows you to customize the existing business rules at the action level to automatically execute. This alleviates the work required to review the exceptions with low impact while allowing the most important exceptions to receive immediate attention. Exceptions that are most suitable for auto-execute of an action are instances where there are no financial considerations, hence they require no intermediate further action.
See Setting Up Business Rules.
Additionally, ITAM provides an option to ignore some exceptions for specified reasons until a given date, at which time they return to regular exception processing.
Assets Not Reporting
To exercise tighter control over IT assets, the IT asset manager needs to track assets that have not reported an inventory for a user-defined time period. Associating these assets with their custodians, department managers or content managers can help the IT asset manager trace the location of these assets in a reasonable amount of time. The IT asset manager can also ensure that corporate IT governance policies are followed adequately in the enterprise. IT assets represent a significant number of assets, so by tracking them and their individual financial impact effectively, the enterprise can realize significant cost savings in terms of redeployment of the assets instead of new acquisitions. By retiring the appropriate assets, if they have indeed been stolen and/or are missing, the accounting department may benefit as well by reflecting accurate asset value on the balance sheet.
You can select assets of interest from the Manage Exceptions search results or from the Manage Assets Not Reporting results and save them in Financial Lists. The lists simultaneously become available to the Financial List Inquiry search and detail pages. This presents the saved data through a simple and powerful format where you can sort, select, remove assets and refresh financial totals based on selection changes. Route the selections to the Finance worklist or retire financial assets using the Financial List Inquiry detail page, which provides a link to the PeopleSoft Asset Management Retire Assets page. This provides an added convenience that minimizes multiple reviews of the same data if there is a small number of assets on the list.