Saint-Gobain APAC primarily tracked and recorded information technology (IT) assets
through Excel spreadsheets. Some offices and operations consolidated asset details
in Microsoft SMS, and later SCCM. User information and some asset details were
tracked in Active Directory. However, no centralized or uniform system existed across
all offices to inventory, track and manage IT assets.
Saint-Gobain decided to take a more organized and automated
approach to managing its IT assets. The strategic vision was to provide the company
with improved visibility into its IT asset infrastructure and also provide links to existing
key strategic systems, including Active Directory and SMS/SCCM. The new system
would make asset information readily available and provide a centralized and holistic
database of IT asset, software and hardware information.
Saint-Gobain wanted the new system to leverage existing information to the greatest extent possible. To that end, xAssets created customized imports to facilitate transfer of classification data, suppliers, assets and software licenses.
xAssets designed a SCCM integration to capture Saint-Gobain’s specific data,
such as computer image build versions.
They customized integration with Active Directory to import additional user details, departments and locations. They also structured the system to automatically produce and email weekly exception reports based on differences found between asset data imported from the various sources to avoid errors and duplicate records. To accommodate the linguistic differences in the Saint-Gobain APAC offices, xAssets configured the system to support character sets in Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic and other languages.
Since completion of the full implementation, Saint-Gobain has undergone a server migration and a
migration from integrating with SCCM 2007 to SCCM
2012. The xAssets software played a key role
in managing these migrations.
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