How the Largest School District in Arizona Successfully Deploys, Tracks Thousands of Devices

MPS was also able to add its students’ IDs into the system by scanning the ID barcode and the device barcode, a process that previously had to be done by hand.

“Students walked up to the table to get their device and we literally scanned their ID, scanned their device, took it out of storage, loaned it out to that student and hit enter and it was done,” says Hamilton.

Troxell and MPS worked together to ensure that all the data was entered properly before the implementation began.

“We had a lot of upfront work that was done probably in the month prior with having [MPS] provide us the information that could be set up in the back end of the SAM system so that when we came to deployment, we had their information ready to go,” says Mark Barber, senior VP of sales at Troxell Communications.

Troxell and SAM specialists also provided two full days of training to each key department person. While all departments were using the same SAM platform, each department was looking to use different SAM features for certain purposes. The training allowed department leaders to weigh in on what they were looking to accomplish with SAM and what features would help them do that.

Hamilton’s purchasing and technician team has leveraged SAM to keep track of devices that have been taken out of schools for repairs.

“Since technicians have the app on their phones, they can scan the device out of say, Adams Elementary School, and put it in the repair shop inventory. When they finish that repair, they can put it back in the Adams inventory,” says Hamilton.

“It’s been an amazing process and unless you go through something like this on a daily or annual basis, you have no idea the implications of it.”—Michelle Hamilton, director of purchasing for Mesa Public Schools.

While the implementation was quite seamless, the district did face a few challenges when uploading data from its old system into SAM.

“The hardest part for us was taking our data from our current system and putting it into a format that was exported well enough for them to upload into SAM,” says Hamilton. “It wasn’t a SAM issue, it was our issue. My recommendation would be that you have a good set of district staff that you can sit down and talk about the issues with. You need somebody in your district who can extract that data.”

Since the SAM implementation, the 63,000 student school district has successfully completed its first phase of device deployment with ease. With more than 10,000 devices still left to deploy, the school expects to rely heavily on SAM to assign and track devices.

“It’s been an amazing process and unless you go through something like this on a daily or annual basis, you have no idea the implications of it,” says Hamilton. “This is a new way of teaching and people are watching us. You’ve got assistant superintendents, you’ve got principals, you’ve got parents that are all watching how we do this process and SAM was a small part of the bigger picture as far as cost. It was small compared to what we invested in for the devices but had we not had it, the deployment would have never gone as well as it did.”