Hi! My name is Elizabeth and I manage
the Events Inventory Program.
The current program started from a
sustainability initiative years ago. My supervisor would purchase items rather
than rent items if she felt we could reuse them for future events. After
joining the team in 2012, I jumped on the band wagon and did the same. Why pay
to rent something repeatedly when you can just buy it once? Colleagues we
worked with regularly knew we had twenty easels and would ask to borrow them
and of course, we said sure! Over time, this started to become a more frequent
inquiry and I took it on to "manage our inventory." In 2013, managing
our inventory was eighty items with occasional requests through email and I
would keep an excel list of who had what, for when. This worked, until some key
people decided they wanted the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering to be the
largest engineering college in the southwest.
Our enrollment numbers skyrocketed, we
were hiring staff and faculty at astronomical rates, and we spread our wings to
the Polytechnic campus. With this came significantly more events and more
awareness of what we had. Our physical inventory started to really grow and so
did the demand; we had to rethink how we can continue to offer our items but
keep up with everything else. By 2014, we had created an online static catalog
of all our items. In 2018, we adapted Asana into our team's operations and
managed all inventory requests there. In 2019, we purchased JotForm to create a
digital request form that integrated with Asana.
By 2022, with all the attempts made to
keep the initiative sustainable, it was starting to become too much. I was
spending too much of my time manually reviewing and approving requests, my role
was rapidly growing in other directions, and I no longer had the bandwidth to
do it all. It was either go big or go home, and I wanted to go big! So, I did.
I spent months researching available software that would eliminate the
middleman (me) from having to manually review and approve orders and finding EZ
Rents Out was a game changer. The platform allowed us to not only continue this
initiative, but turn it into a formal self-sustaining program, which is really
where I wanted to take this all those years. Today, I continue this program to
support our ASU community - staff, faculty, and students.
Our current catalog consists of over 1,500 items -
submit an order today!
Elizabeth Cross
Events Coordinator, Sr.
Events Inventory Program Manager
Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering Dean's Office
Arizona State University
