I used to be the sysadmin for a high school, and I was also in charge of property inventory. Every time someone in the school purchased something needing an asset tag (anything >=$750, and computers no matter the cost), the procedure went as follows:

- Someone would make a purchase and not tell me.

- School district's Property Control office would mail me a letter about the purchase with a paper copy of the PO. I would use my campus master keys to go and, amidst protest, confiscate the untagged product(s), if someone on the faculty hadn't already taken it home for personal use.

- I would have to fill out a property received form, fill in the information from the PO along with a product description and serial number. Print the form, sign it, and fax it back to Property Control, where a data entry clerk would key it into the CICS database (sometimes even correctly!), which was really just a flat table, so multiple instances of the same product would be spelled differently and impossible to sort/lookup.

- Property Control would send someone to the school to slap a barcode sticker on the product, and I'd return the product to the faculty member who bought it.