Assign, reassign or unassign devices in Apple Business Manager

Your account contains a record of all the orders you have placed directly with Apple after 1 March 2011. Because accounts with participating Apple Authorised Resellers or providers may not keep records going back to 1 March 2011, consult your participating Apple Authorised Reseller or mobile network provider for your account’s order timeline.

Before you can assign devices, you must have entered your appropriate Apple Customer Number and/or communicated your Organisation ID to a participating Apple Authorised Reseller or mobile network provider and added their Reseller Number to your account. See Manage device suppliers.

Note: When entering your Apple Customer Number, omit any leading zeros.

A device must be assigned to a mobile device management (MDM) server in order for Setup Assistant to add the device to Apple Business Manager and enrol in the MDM solution.

Make sure sensitive data is secure

During the device configuration process, you can increase the security of sensitive data by ensuring that you have appropriate security measures in place. For example:

Have your users authenticate as part of the initial setup flow in the Apple device’s Setup Assistant during activation.
Provide a preliminary configuration with limited access and require additional device configuration to access sensitive data.

Choose how you want to assign devices

After an order ships, you can search for the order number and use it to assign devices to an authorised mobile device management (MDM) server. For example, when you place an iPhone order for 5000 units, you can use the order number to assign all, or a specific number of, devices to an existing authorised MDM server. There are several ways to assign devices:

Device Management: you can reassign devices from one MDM server to another. For example, you may want to spread a load of 10,000 devices from one single MDM server to three or four servers.
Source: you can assign devices from different sources. For example, you may purchase all iPhone and iPad devices from one source and all Mac computers from another. The sources are:
- Apple (Apple Customer Number)
- Apple Authorised Reseller or mobile network provider
- AppleCare (for replaced devices)
- Apple Configurator (for devices added manually)
Order number: assigning devices by order number makes sense if a single MDM server is used for an entire device deployment (or a single order), and if devices are still in their original packaging and are going directly to the users.
Device type: you can assign devices by type and model to a specific MDM server. This method makes sense if the devices you need to assign are all managed in an identical manner. You can search for device types using the search field at the top of the window.
Storage size: you can assign devices by how much storage they came with when purchased or manually enrolled. For example, you may want to assign all MacBook Pro computers with 1 terabyte of storage to an MDM server used by your graphics department.
Serial number: you can paste up to 1,024 serial numbers from a text file, with each serial number separated by a comma.