The situation
The university offers every faculty member a computer, but the program behind that promise had become a burden. Faculty filed applications, departments created purchase orders, and reimbursement requests moved through finance one at a time. Every order meant price comparisons, chartstring charges, and administrative work spread across academic departments, IT, and the finance office. At year end, department finance managers and central finance spent days on forensic accounting: verifying reimbursements and entering journal corrections to clean up the books. Machines arrived unconfigured, and there was no reliable picture of what hardware was in the field or when it should be replaced.
What we did
We rebuilt the program as a closed-loop hardware lifecycle running on ServiceNow:
- A catalog order form where faculty or their department IT support pick from standard Apple, Dell, and Lenovo offerings, with display bundles as no-cost add-ons
- An API integration from ServiceNow to SHI, the university’s reseller, which stocks pre-purchased inventory in a regional warehouse, applies asset tags, and ships on order
- Asset and CI records created in ServiceNow before the device ships, so every machine is registered and assigned to its faculty member from day one
- Receiving, enrollment, and delivery task workflows, so devices arrive pre-configured: standard software, endpoint management enrolled, domain joined, ready to use
- Eligibility rules driven by HR data, covering all faculty ranks including lecturers, postdocs, and visitors, with new hires eligible before their start date
- Lifecycle management with a defined refresh cycle, proactive replacement notifications, and reclaim-and-recycle handling for returned machines
Central funding replaced the department-by-department purchase and reimbursement process entirely. Ordering, fulfillment, delivery, and refresh all run as one workflow with quality metrics at each stage.
Results
- Order-to-delivery time under two weeks, from a catalog request to a configured machine
- Reimbursement requests and departmental purchase orders eliminated from the program
- A clean month-end and year-end close for finance, with no reimbursement verification or journal corrections
- Every device asset-tagged and registered to its owner in ServiceNow before delivery
- A closed lifecycle: warrantied, refreshed on schedule, reclaimed and recycled at end of life
- Simpler ordering for faculty, and an incentive to run a secure, managed device, since machines arrive secured and enrolled in endpoint management