How Varsity Brands Reclaimed 10+ Hours a Month with Asset Management for Jira
Varsity Brands is the leading platform for sport, offering a comprehensive range of services and solutions across team and club sports, cheer, dance, performing arts and yearbook. As a holistic services provider to athletic programs and schools, Varsity Brands delivers highly customized uniforms, apparel, equipment, training, education, competitions and more.
That breadth of customers means supporting seasonal events, mobile staff, and equipment moving between offices, fields, and venues. Keeping track of who has what – laptops, devices, software licenses is operationally critical.
Chad Spencer is the IT Manager who runs that operational backbone. His team works with the service desk, systems, networking, and lifecycle groups whose people touch equipment every day. Chad has spent years working with ITAM tools, and he has firm opinions about which patterns hold up under real pressure and which collapse the first time a technician finds them inconvenient.
Before: spreadsheets, ghost equipment, and reactive lifecycle management
Chad’s team had cycled through several asset-management tools over the years. Most were expensive. None earned back what they cost. By the time the company consolidated on Jira as its single ticketing system, asset tracking had quietly drifted back to where it started: a spreadsheet.
That spreadsheet bled time in predictable ways. When somebody left the company, IT couldn’t easily tell them exactly what equipment to return. The polite question (what should I be giving back?) didn’t have a verified answer. The honest one, anything that belongs to the company, was the right answer in principle and a logistics problem in practice. Things slipped through.
Records that captured lifecycles, equipment age and more were not centralized and the team sometimes found themselves reacting to field issues and audits without a centralized source of information.
Why Asset Management for Jira
Once tickets and workflows lived in Jira, keeping assets somewhere else stopped making sense. The team was also under deadline pressure on projects that needed an asset solution in place fast. Migrating to a tool with a multi-week ramp-up wasn’t an option. Chad started looking.
Varsity evaluated the options available through their current tools as well as a few new outside solutions. The decision came down to whether the tool would actually be used by the people closest to the assets: the service desk, systems, and networking.
The tool could not be too complex for technicians to update accurately or records would degrade and the issues would continue.
“We needed those close to the assets to be able to manage it easily. If the tool wasn’t easy to manage, technicians wouldn’t take the time to make necessary updates.”
AMFJ worked natively inside Jira, imported devices straight from Microsoft Intune without manual entry, and let Chad’s team configure custom fields and reports for the data they cared about. This solution clearly brought the best overall value and best solution to what the business needs.
“The service you get from the support staff is unmatched. The team isn’t just supporting you because you bought a product. They truly want you to be successful with it. You want a partner like that.”
Chad Spencer - IT Manager, Varsity
Same-day setup
Chad’s team added AMFJ to their sandbox in an afternoon. By end of day, they had imported assets via Intune, configured custom fields for the details that mattered, and started linking equipment to Jira tickets. The pressured project they’d been worried about? They delivered ahead of schedule.
Almost immediately, the broader team was making updates without escalation. Service desk technicians changed an asset’s status while resolving a ticket, instead of routing it back to the lifecycle team. The lifecycle team, freed from being the bottleneck, started using their time on planning instead of data entry.
Results: 10+ hours a month, redirected
Multiply that across twelve months. That’s three full work-weeks Chad’s team gets back every year. Time that now goes into proactive lifecycle planning, license recovery, and audit prep instead of spreadsheet babysitting.
“Between the different team members tracking assets, we are able to redirect 10+ hours a month into other tasks, responsibilities, and improvements.”
Now when somebody leaves, IT knows exactly what to collect, the conversation with the departing employee about equipment is short, and nothing goes missing. Refreshes happen on schedule because equipment age and assignment history are visible at a glance.
The license tracking Varsity Brands has been rolling out is already finding licenses the team would have re-purchased. Previously, records lived in whatever sheet the assigning person was using, and discovering a reusable seat depended on remembering who had assigned it. Now everyone on the team can see who has a particular license and whether it’s available. That’s a recovery the previous system quietly buried.
Broader impact
Varsity Brands leadership wants to make decisions on data, not gut. That requires a system where the data exists, is current, and can be pulled into reports without a week of cleanup first.
“The tool has helped us operate more efficiently and more importantly smarter. We want to be a data-driven organization, and we can only accomplish that by having the information in a platform that allows us to extrapolate, report, and predict.”
Looking ahead
The relationship has compounded. Through periodic feature surveys, Chad’s team has put forward requests, and many of them have shipped. License management was the most recent and most consequential. The pattern (request, ship, see real value) is the kind of vendor relationship Chad came in hoping for and rarely sees in practice.
