Hardware asset management (HAM) tools are software applications and technology used by enterprise companies to manage all types of hardware assets, including IT, line of business and facilities management — regardless of location and industry. Key functionality includes the ability to: - Discover, identify, normalize, aggregate and store data for hardware assets. - Reconcile and manage the complete asset life cycle: procurement, arrival, storage, provisioning, use, transfer, service and disposition. - Govern access, visibility and control to specific assets based on the user’s role. - Optimize and integrate with other IT and financial systems for data, processes and workflow. - Flexibly assign asset ownership to a person, department or location. - Scale in record size and number of records as the organization grows. - Share standardized reports, create custom reporting and export data into other reporting systems. - Offer APIs for asset information to be ingested/entered through integration with procurement systems, software asset management (SAM) solutions or inventoried through CMDB or network discovery tools — as well as bar codes or RFID tags.