Last up in our blog series on maintenance and support contract best practices – determining if and when to renew maintenance contracts and identifying and controlling asset information.
Organizations find it difficult to conduct financial analyses without advanced notice of pending contract expirations and details of connected software products. Before support contracts expire, companies must determine whether to renew their support contracts or replace equipment with new assets. When your company has access to support and maintenance information, it can more effectively produce cost analyses for these support-renew versus asset-replacement decisions.
In order to maintain data integrity and accuracy, IT organizations require proper access controls. You can easily establish these controls by rigorously managing asset and inventory information according to who can change it and decide which information is viewable to which users. Only personnel who have direct ownership, management, or support responsibilities for the equipment should modify or update this information.
In order to facilitate a powerful client communication and support process, Advanced Systems Group (ASG) uses a virtual support system called Smarttrack.
Smarttrack from ASG provides a centralized repository for managing your hardware and software support contracts. With secure access to your information via a web-browser 24×7, managing your multi-vendor maintenance contracts has never been easier. Smarttrack contains detailed information such as maintenance contract numbers, contract start and end dates, equipment serial numbers, and other company information.
For more information about Smartrack visit http://www.virtual.com/x.php?p=Support.
If you haven’t read the 4 previous posts on Maintenance and Support Contracts you can read them by clicking the links below. Be sure to let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment!
