Plano School District Case Study

SherpaDesk's Innovation Helps The Plano Independent School District Audit 40,000 Assets

Improved operational efficiency by optimizing inventory and asset tracking across more than 72 campuses.

Barcode Scanner Inventory

Fast Audit

Audit Reporting

Barcode Scanner Inventory

Fast Audit

Audit Reporting

Overview

The Plano Independent School District is among the top 75 largest school districts in the country with 4,000 teachers and a student count of 54,000+, spread over 72 campuses. All technology needs for the school district are managed by a central IT Help Desk & Technology Security department.

By using SherpaDesk's PSA software and its Asset Management feature with seamless barcode scanning technology, the Plano Independent School District's IT Helpdesk Department is driving improved operational efficiency by optimizing inventory and asset tracking for over 72 campuses.

adult-ginger-handsome-man-with-laptop-computer-sitting-terrace-restaurant-cafe

The Plano Independent School District now has the capability to not only count, but deploy, move, retire and check in and out hardware via a simple hand-held scan

The Challenge

Plano Independent School District partnered with their State Government and Google to provide Chromebooks to all students through a 1:1 initiative. This created asset management challenges for the IT Department, who needed to process, tag, and deploy the devices district-wide. The department also required robust audit capabilities to track these assets and generate reports for annual reviews.

Time Savings

The system dramatically reduces asset auditing time. Plano Independent School District reports saving seven hours per 1500 assets - for 30,000 assets, this means saving 140 hours (17.5 working days).
These time savings benefit both the IT Department and internal auditors who track state-sponsored school assets like Chromebooks.
SherpaDesk's Asset Management feature integrates with auditor workflows, allowing them to track hardware status, IT tickets, location, and assignments.

The Innovation

By integrating asset scanning devices with SherpaDesk's PSA & Asset Management feature, Plano Independent School District IT techs can now deploy assets and audit an entire classroom with a single handheld barcode scanning device. This reduces inspection time per class to mere seconds, hence decreasing their overall audit time from weeks to days.

Beneﬁts

The Plano Independent School District has seen asset deployment and auditing times decrease immensely. Asset scanning now takes seconds, enabling overall audit times to be reduced from weeks to days. To facilitate compliance, the Plano Independent School District has granted the state auditor access to all of their asset’s information. This enables state auditors to seamlessly pull reports and get the most accurate and up to date information on any given group of assets. Other Areas of improvement the Plano ISD has seen are:

Support Services
Customer Satisfaction
Accountability
Reporting

Process Improvements
Asset Tracking and Management
Notiﬁcations and Communications
Project Management, Task Tracking

How The New Process Works

Uploading resources

The IT team uploads their hardware assets into SherpaDesk's Asset Manager.

Scan the barcode

Each piece of hardware gets barcode scanned via the integrated handheld device and assigned a physical location (classroom number etc.).

Getting a list of assets

To run an asset audit, techs are now able to go to each classroom (or office) and automatically pull up a list of the assets assigned to that particular room via a barcode scan using a hand held device.

Scanning a room

The handheld device scans rooms to verify assigned assets are present. Missing items enter a queue and remain marked as missing until found in a future audit. For unfound assets, techs can check logs for last known location, checkout status, and service history.

Tech Innovation

Using a bar-code scanning mobile solution integrated seamlessly with SherpaDesk, users can now add, move, retire and check IN/OUT assets in seconds.

"We were able to add and commission a cart of 36 Chromebooks in under 5 minutes. The physical inventory for each cart now takes 8 seconds. This is a huge time saver. Thanks to this new system, we've been able to add and commission over 40,000 assets this year in a fraction of the time it used to take us before”

Plano Independent School District Inventory Department

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The Randi Weaver Interview

To ﬁnd out how the SherpaDesk Asset Management feature & asset tracking integration has helped improve their hardware auditing processes, we spoke to Randi Weaver, Coordinator of Help Desk & Technology Security for the Plano Independent School District.

Read the full interview