BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management provides the following features to reduce the total cost of ownership of your CIs and increase return on investment:
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
Software license management | Reduces software license overspending and non-compliance through greater accuracy in discovering, tracking, and reallocating software licenses. By automatically linking discovered software configuration items to software license certificates, BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management can report on license compliance and facilitate license reallocation. |
Contract management | Tracks the status, type, terms, conditions, payments, and other information about lease, software, warranty, and maintenance contracts |
Blackout schedules | Lists available or unavailable time for CIs |
Inventory management | Specifies, tracks, and manages individual CIs and bulk items. |
Configuration management | Defines standard configurations, or setups, for different people or groups within a company, and maintains the status of the CIs within the configurations |
Lifecycle IT CI management | Uses best practices workflow to handle all phases of the IT CI management lifecycle from requisition, purchase, and receipt, to installation and deployment |
Cost module | Consolidates CI costs from procurement to disposition, and allocates and tracks costs to cost centers |
Requisition management | Creates purchase requisitions, manages the approvals of the requisitions, initiates the creation of purchase orders, and manages the receipt of items from suppliers and the creation of the associated CIs |
Software asset management
Organizations can acquire software in different ways. Software can be built for a specific purpose within the company. Software can be purchased from a software vendor or outsourcer. Software can be acquired through an acquisition or merger between companies, or between departments within a single company.
Software asset management is a core component of an overall asset management policy. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) in the Software Asset Management Book defines software asset management as "all of the infrastructure and processes necessary for the effective management, control and protection of the software assets within an organization, throughout all stages of their lifecycle."
ITIL indicates that the following processes make up the holistic approach to software asset management:
Standard configuration
The standard configurations define what type of software or hardware a particular group is entitled to. The configurations are stored in the Configuration form. This form has a header component that describes the configuration and a line item component that describes each of the components (hardware or software) that make up this standard configuration.
The Standard configurations functionality is integrated with the BMC Change Management application to facilitate the procurement process. The standard configuration compares what is available in the inventory to determine which items are available and which items need to be procured.
Configuration management
In BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management, Configuration Management consists of processes that ensure CIs are available when BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management requires CIs. If CIs are not available, request new CIs. For acquiring new CIs, you can create new or use existing contracts with the suppliers. Configuration management also consists of processes to ensure that the supplier and the contract information is updated.
The following figure shows the configuration management process flow:
| Sequence | Process | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| Configuration administrators, purchasing agents, and approvers order new CIs. | Creating and managing purchase requisitions |
2. Supplier Information Maintenance | Configuration administrators register new suppliers or update the contact details of the existing suppliers. | Adding contact information |
| 3. CI Registration | Configuration administrators and purchasing agents register when they create new CIs. | Creating CIs |
| 4. CI Update | Configuration administrators update the attributes or relations of the existing CIs. | Modifying records |
| 5. Contract Administration | Configuration administrator when they create new contracts or update the existing contracts. |
Configuration catalog
Use the configuration catalog in BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management to set up and manage approved configurations in your company.
Production dataset
Production dataset is the central data source referenced by the entire IT environment. In BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management, BMC.Assets is the production dataset that stores the information about all the configuration items (CIs). For more information about dataset, see CMDB Orientation 
.
Quick tour of Asset management
You can watch the following video for a quick tour of Asset management:
Role-based console
Depending on your role, you might have access to one or more of the consoles listed in the following table. You can access these consoles from the navigation pane of the BMC Remedy AR System IT Home page.
Console | Used by | Purpose | More information |
|---|---|---|---|
Purchasing |
|
| |
Approval | Anyone with permission to approve a purchase requisition Important: This console is also used by BMC Change Management. |
| |
Receiving | Configuration administrators |
| |
Contract Management | Contract managers | Create and manage contracts | |
Software Asset Management | Software asset managers |
|
Reports
BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management provides various predefined reports to give you quick and easy access to information about your system. Use the Report console to generate these reports. If the predefined reports return more information than you need, you can manage the scope of the report by using qualifications. For more information, see Using reports and flashboards.
