Tag, you're it: The University's inventory is under control

	Shirley Clarke, program assistant in nursing services, uses a Top Gun bar code scanner to take inventory of her department’s equipment. Photo by Rex Bavousett.

On your computer. On that microscope in your lab. On the lathe in your shop. Look around your work space, and you’re sure to find dozens of them adhered to all kinds of equipment. Those small metal tags that say "University of Iowa." You see them every day but probably never pay attention to them.

The staff of the Property Management Office pays attention to them. Each tag has more than just the name of the University on it. It also has a unique six-digit ID number for that piece of equipment and, if the equipment is a relatively recent acquisition, a bar code. Call the Property Management Office (PMO) with the number, and they can recite the history of that piece of equipment: when it was purchased, how much it cost, where it’s located, and who currently uses it.

That’s part of their job. The staff at the PMO are responsible for tagging and identifying the University’s capitalized moveable assets. In other words, they keep track of our stuff.

What counts as valuable?

"The University has a $2,000 threshold," said Robert Hansen, assistant controller. "Any item that’s a tangible asset with a useful life of one year or more costing $2,000 or more goes into our database."

That threshold dates back to July 1, 1997. Before that, the minimum was $500. That figure was up from earlier thresholds of $300 and, before that, $100. So when an old filing cabinet sports an ID tag, it probably dates back to an era of lower thresholds. There are two exceptions to the $2,000 threshold. Library holdings are tracked individually by the libraries. Works of art appear on the PMO’s database, even though some have a declared value of only one dollar.

As of April 5, there were 57,613 individual assets in the database. The total value was $603,322,748.39. The single most valuable piece of moveable equipment is at the hospital. It’s a magnetic resonance imager valued at approximately $4.5 million.

The oddest request?

"A walk-in freezer door," said Gary Burge, administrative accountant at PMO. "We were asked to tag the door when it was replaced because it was moveable equipment. When you pick up the phone around here, you never know what the question is going to be."

The life of an asset

There are many possible beginnings, twists, turns, and ends in the life of a piece of equipment. The PMO tracks them all.

The process begins at acquisition. Every time a voucher for a new purchase comes through the Accounts Payable department for payment, the PMO is alerted. From there, they contact the department and arrange for a tagger to visit the site.

Sometimes equipment enters the University through means other than a simple purchase. It may be donated. It may arrive with a new faculty member. Occasionally a piece of equipment that’s never been tagged or catalogued simply turns up during a regular departmental inventory.

Some items leave the system through the Surplus Store. If a piece is simply too outmoded or worn out to be of further use to anybody, it’s carted off to the Surplus Store and deleted from the database. Some items may live on in other ways. Even though a piece of scientific equipment may no longer be useful where it is, it might be transferred to another department that can use it. A broken machine often can be cannibalized and its parts used in other machines.

When a researcher leaves the University for another job, and there’s a piece of equipment they need to continue their research, a transfer may be negotiated with the other institution, allowing the equipment to follow its user. Equipment that’s lost or stolen also has to be accounted for in the database.

For every possible change in the status of a piece of equipment, there’s a proper form that departments should use to notify the PMO of the change. To download the forms, or for instructions and additional information on the PMO, visit its web site at www.uiowa.edu/~fusprop.

Technology for easier tracking

Sooner or later, somebody in every department gets to know their asset tags intimately. At inventory time.

Every two years, each department must conduct an inventory of its equipment. The newer bar-coded tags have made this process relatively painless. Before the bar codes, the PMO would issue each department a list of all its equipment in the current database. Then somebody in the department would track down each piece of equipment and manually match up the six-digit numbers on the list with the numbers on the tags.

Now, instead of a paper list, the PMO can lend each department a Top Gun. It’s a hand-held bar code scanner.

"This is the third or fourth year we’ve been pushing the scanners," Burge said. "We can walk into a department, scan their assets, and find 60 to 70 percent of their assets."

From there, the PMO plugs the Top Gun into a docking port in its computer system, updates the file, and prints out a variance report listing the wayward 30 to 40 percent of items. The departments then track down the items on this shorter list.

"The PMO is appreciative of the efforts that various personnel in the departments perform to ‘inventory’ their assets," Burge said.

Not every item can be tagged. The PMO also tracks soft-0s and blank-0s. No, they’re not the two lost Marx brothers. Soft-0s are pieces of licensed software, which count as assets. Blank-0s are items that are impractical to tag because of small size or sterilization requirements.

"If there’s a $40,000 instrument with a probe that’s going into somebody’s body, probably the last thing they’d want on it is a 21 cent tag," Burge said.

"Especially if it’s starting to peel," Hansen added.

Article by Sam Samuels