How DMA Saved 200+ Hours a Year by Bringing Asset Management Inside Jira
The Challenge: Too Many Clicks, Too Many Tabs
For 15 years, David Slingluff, who leads IT operations at DMA, had a dream: get his team working from one pane of glass. Instead, his technicians were bouncing between a homegrown internal website for asset tracking and Jira, where they lived all day long.
The workflow was painful in a way that’s easy to underestimate. A technician gets a ticket from Jane Doe. They open a separate browser tab, navigate to the internal asset tool, search for Jane Doe, find the right asset tag, then switch to their remote software and type it in. Multiply that by 50 to 60 tickets a day, six technicians, 6,500 tickets a year.
That’s over 200 hours of cumulative time spent just toggling between systems. And that’s assuming everything goes right the first time.
Travis, who handles the bulk of asset operations at DMA, described another sore spot. When the team purchased new hardware or moved equipment between the Indianapolis and Fort Wayne offices, every single asset had to be updated individually.
The Catalyst: A Cloud Migration and a Long-Overdue Opportunity
There wasn’t one dramatic breaking point. David had been waiting for the right moment, and it came when DMA migrated from on-premise Jira to the cloud.
DMA didn’t pick the first tool they found. They evaluated multiple options.
Asset Panda was trialed but didn’t meet their needs. Jira’s native Assets (part of JSM Premium) was a build-it-from-scratch solution.
Their must-have list was clear:
Asset display in tickets. The asset had to be visible right inside the Jira ticket, no extra navigation.
Auto-linking. When someone creates a ticket, the relevant assets should link automatically.
Reporting. They needed to report back to accounting on equipment changes and track lifecycle for refresh planning.
Bulk editing. Moving 10 laptops between offices couldn’t mean 10 separate manual edits.
AMFJ checked every box. And it did something the others didn’t: it worked out of the box, unlike the native Jira assets feature which felt complex.
Getting Started: An Excel Sheet and 25 Minutes
DMA ran a trial in their Jira demo environment before committing. Travis uploaded a test spreadsheet of 25 assets to see what would happen.
The team spent about three months in the demo environment, not because the tool was hard to learn, but because they wanted to clean up their existing data before going live. Old assets, duplicates, things they didn’t want to carry over. Once they were ready, Travis imported a clean Excel sheet into AMFJ.
The Results
Time Saved: ~36 Hours Per Technician, Per Year
With assets now linked directly inside Jira tickets, the constant tab-switching disappeared. Technicians see the asset right in the ticket, click through to remote software, and get to work.
Across six technicians and 6,500 annual tickets, DMA estimates they’re saving close to a full work week per year just on the context-switching alone.
Bulk Operations: Hours to Minutes
When DMA moves equipment between offices or receives a shipment of 100+ monitors, Travis can now import an Excel sheet or tag similar assets and run a bulk update. What used to require opening each asset individually, editing fields one by one, and saving, now takes a fraction of the time.
Reporting Without Manual Counting
DMA can now run reports on equipment lifecycle, ownership changes, and inventory status without going through assets one by one. David’s team uses this to report back to accounting and is building the case to shorten their hardware refresh cycle from five to four years, using ticket-linked asset data to demonstrate that older hardware generates more support issues.
The Bigger Picture
DMA isn’t done. They’re exploring AMFJ’s Jira field sync feature to surface asset attributes, like warranty expiration and model number, directly in their ticket queues. They’re also looking into the Microsoft Intune integration to automate device syncing. And they’re using ticket-linked asset data to build an evidence-based case for shortening their hardware refresh cycle from five years to four.
