NOTE: all orders require a minimum 5-day lead time and no exceptions can be made to this policy.
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
 
Questions? Contact Elizabeth.Cross@asu.edu
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