It never ceases to amaze us how many companies don't know exactly what they own. There are more cases of monitors, mice, keyboards, spare computers, and especially RAM "walking off" than we care to remember. Unfortunately, not all of your employees are as honest as you and we would like to believe. By having Escape perform a thorough hardware inventory, you can know the machines you own, their serial numbers, and every card, RAM chip, and peripheral in it or attached to it. We often are asked to consolidate this information with the company controller's own records and thereby include original purchase date, vendor, and price in the report.

Another excellent use for this information is the easy redeployment of pieces of hardware. Over the life cycle of your equipment, it may need to be passed around as peoples' jobs change and computers get moved from employee to employee. They may not require all the "goodies" that were once installed in their computer, and those assets and resources could be better used elsewhere in the organization. A total hardware inventory gives you a precise overhead view of what you have -- and where. You can keep an eye out for "shrinkage" and make most appropriate use of your available assets and resources at the same time.

A unique benefit of this service that demonstrates the special lengths to which Escape goes for its clients is proactive issue notification. If we observe a problem on similar machine at several different clients (or get an outright recall notice from a vendor), we'll issue a service bulletin to all clients who have that kind of machine. This, of course, only works if you've had a hardware inventory performed by Escape.

Yet another reason to have a hardware inventory is theft protection. Though it's happened only once, we did have an individual bring in a Power Mac for repair that was already in our database as belonging to an advertising agency. Sure enough, the machine was stolen, though the agency had given up hope of ever finding the machine again.