All organizations are working hard to achieve efficient and effective business practices to not only manage their IT assets, but to also contribute to the strategic direction of their organizations. Organizations today are balancing internal goals for savings and risk reduction against the external pressures required by legislation, the changing economy and the need to incorporate the operation of IT into the mission of the organization. While organizations have had some success by improving traditional business practices, the real victories go to organizations analyzing the IT environment across the disciplines of Finance, Legal, Operations and Inventory. EnterpriseLM is the tool that allows achievement of this vision, providing the repository for the data and the process functionality that allows organizations to grow from reactive to proactive management of their IT resources.

Understanding the benefits to Eracent's EnterpriseLM is like building your checklist to success. Here are some of the ways that EnterpriseLM helps enterprises make critical improvements in order to attain the efficient and profitable management of their IT assets.

Comprehensive Lifecycle Management

The Eracent EnterpriseLM product provides a secure, relational database in which users can catalog and retrieve detailed asset information from each point in an IT asset's lifecycle, including:

• Procurement data
• Financials
• Asset assignment, configuration and IMAC history
• Hardware asset data for leased and purchased machines
• Software licensing information/entitlements
• Contract and Lease terms and conditions
• Warranty and maintenance information
• Vendor information
• Disposal management
• Detailed Audit Trail

By knowing their inventory, business decisions can be made based on analysis, generating significant savings by efficiently utilizing assets, re-deploying existing assets when possible, and otherwise avoiding unnecessary expenditures for hardware and software.

With EnterpriseLM, assets of all types are managed via process development and accurate data collection. With proper policy development and documentation from EnterpriseLM and other sources, organizations are well on their way to meeting the criteria for accountability required by Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) as well as the U.S. agency requirements for the Clinger-Cohen Act. EnterpriseLM provides the structure necessary to make compliance sustainable over the long term.

Reduce Risk and Cost

Risk can take many forms. Eracent's EnterpriseLM enables organization to reduce the risk associated with not efficiently and effectively managing one's assets, including the most common forms:

• Compliance by managing software entitlements to insure compliance
• Financial by verifying purchase and invoice information (most analysts estimate invoice errors to be in error 30 – 70% of the time), eliminating unnecessary costs (i.e. maintenance on software no longer in use) and consolidating contracts
• Optimization by identifying and redeploying available assets, this includes both hardware and software
• Regulations (i.e. Sarbanes – Oxley, HIPAA, EPA requirements) by tracking contracts and financials along with related asset information, including an audit trail on all changes

Automation / Manage by Exception

The EnterpriseLM solution not only allows customers to track a significant amount of information around the lifecycle of an asset, but provides the mechanisms to notify users of key dates and changes. Our flexible reporting and ad hoc tools allow users to quickly identify and retrieve the information they want.

Improve Decision Making Process

Most organizations have disparate information. This common realization lowers management's expectations to ‘best guesses' when it comes to asset lifecycle information and analysis. These estimates typically require a significant effort and there is usually a concern/question about the accuracy. As a centralized enterprise solution, EnterpriseLM conforms to an organization's processes. The repository collects and maintains the information based on those processes and provides a single location to analyze the enterprise information.

Vendor Management

The comprehensive contract management capabilities allow customers to track all contracts along with key information including terms and conditions, associated assets, company history, costs, associated documents, etc. This information empowers organizations to ensure vendor compliance, identify consolidation opportunities, leverage previous ‘special Ts and Cs' with future contracts and track issues/problems which could be used to your advantage in future negotiations.