Many concerns surround the topic of chain of custody in the ITAD process. You can avoid missing ”links” in the “chain” by carefully tracking the equipment internally before your assets reach your ITAD vendor. The more steps you take to track decommissioned assets prior to them leaving your facility, the more traceable and the less risk you will have at the last step in the process, the asset disposition.

Traceability

The moment assets go offline and are decommissioned, they can go missing when they’re placed in the wrong pile, taken and used by another employee, or are moved to another room or building. The things that can go wrong are easily avoidable when you have a good process in place. The time to start tracking assets begins well before your vendor arrives for pickup.

Establish a good process for tracking assets that can be implemented once assets are decommissioned.  Just marking an asset off in your ITAM system or a spreadsheet is not enough.  You should set up ways to track and control assets prior to disposal – sometimes this can be a period of several months.  Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags is a great option.  RFIDs are now more affordable than they’ve been in the past, and can be adopted for an added level of traceability across your facilities.

SOURCE: business2community.com