A Seamless Integration
COBUS Systems
Founding Year
1992
Headquarter
Rheda-Wiedenbrück
Industry
IT
Assets
2.000
The Challenge: Managing a Large Volume of Assets
Dennis Werner, Head of COBUS Systems
COBUS Systems, a division of the COBUS Group, has been a major player in the IT Managed Services industry in Germany for over 30 years. The company supports its clients with a wide range of solutions to create robust, stable, secure, and scalable IT infrastructure: from managed services to Microsoft 365 integration, to cloud solutions from wind turbines.
As a 360° provider of IT managed services, COBUS Systems manages a significant number of assets. This primarily involved IT assets for network discovery with Lansweeper and inventory managed in large spreadsheets. In addition to IT assets, they also manage office furniture, work equipment, machinery, and more. As can be imagined, the larger the volume of assets, the more unwieldy the Excel spreadsheets become.
Moreover, managing IT and other company assets in spreadsheets came with its own challenges, including susceptibility to errors and bottlenecks when staff are away or busy with other projects and therefore unable to keep those spreadsheets up to date. This is where happy coincidences step in. While searching for an inventory management solution, COBUS came across Timly and was impressed by its capabilities. They were even more pleased to discover that Timly had an API integration with Lansweeper, a company COBUS was very familiar with. COBUS had already implemented Lansweeper as a powerful IT Discovery and inventory solution for IT, OT, and IoT assets a few months earlier, around the same time Lansweeper and Timly became partners.
After that, COBUS’s decision was clear: they would implement Timly’s asset tracking solution for their clients. This marked the beginning of a great collaboration between COBUS, Lansweeper, and Timly.
The Solution: Integrating The Powerful Duo Lansweeper + Timly
Implementing Timly as an integrated asset tracking solution with Lansweeper meant migrating Lansweeper from onsite to the cloud for COBUS. They connected Timly and Lansweeper via the API, cleaned up their master asset data, and then imported around 1,000 assets into Timly in the initial push.
The integration of Lansweeper x Timly has significantly simplified asset tracking systems for COBUS, enabling them to build and pass these systems on to their end users. In this sense, Timly’s inventory management software provided the missing piece for COBUS in its comprehensive managed services.
“Through automation, I have an always up-to-date overview of all company assets that is also complete, while the traditional approach with Excel means I have an assumption where a device is located, go there, hope it’s still there, and that I can then keep this data current.” Stefan Krause – Channel Manager at Lansweeper
Here’s how the integration works: Lansweeper scans the IT infrastructure to detect and catalog all assets connected to the network. These IT Discovery data can be transferred to the Timly platform with just a few clicks. This greatly enriches the Timly inventory database with detailed and automated entries about IT assets, eliminating errors such as incorrect serial numbers and saving valuable time.
In Timly, each asset has a digital record containing all necessary details. These records are either synced from Lansweeper or created separately for non-IT assets. To thoroughly and accurately organize assets, COBUS makes full use of Timly’s organizational units feature, allowing them to compartmentalize asset management for each managed client. Besides the essential features for managing items, COBUS haadded important modules such as the ticketing system, deadline management, and digital signatures for asset check-outs. This has boosted traceability, accountability, and efficiency.
“With a solution like Lansweeper, I have automatic network scans, recognize all assets that are in my IT environment, and can then transfer this information from Lansweeper with just one click into Timly, and have every device, every software license, every cloud instance, directly listed in my asset database.” Stefan Krause – Channel Manager at Lansweeper
Most used functions:
Digital Signature
Allocating Inventory
Allocating assets in Timly is a key piece of the IT asset management puzzle implemented by COBUS Systems. It allows assets to be assigned to employees, locations, and projects.
Most used functions:
Digital Signature
Allocating Inventory
Allocating assets in Timly is a key piece of the IT asset management puzzle implemented by COBUS Systems. It allows assets to be assigned to employees, locations, and projects.
The Result: 360-Degree Inventory Management
“When an employee says ‘my computer is a bit slow, I need a little more memory’, what previously would have been a challenge to even identify the device in question, unless you connected onto it, now we can simply look in Timly and locate a free memory slot – we can reorder and upgrade.” Dennis Werner – Head of COBUS Systems
By choosing enhanced inventory management with Timly and Lansweeper, COBUS has built solid processes that ensure optimized asset utilization and increased efficiency. The synergy between Timly and Lansweeper offers a 360° inventory management solution, giving COBUS and its clients a unified platform and full control over IT assets and other company inventory.
We are proud to support COBUS with a powerful tool that simplifies inventory management and improves their daily workflows. COBUS is so pleased with their experience that they are looking to expand their use of Timly’s asset tracking solution even further.
“We have just ordered around 4,000 barcode labels from Timly that we plan to attach to all kinds of assets to effectively have a comprehensive overview of what we have, what’s relevant for accounting purposes, including for depreciation, etc.” Dennis Werner – Head of COBUS Systems