Whether it’s a fleet of vehicles, medical equipment, or even equipment maintenance tools, having accurate records of where assets are at all times is crucial to the profitability and growth of a company.
Using tools like an asset management app or asset tracking software will allow your company to make informed decisions about its physical inventory. Being able to effectively track fixed assets can improve productivity, ensure compliance, prevent and predict asset failure, and reduce costly downtime.
Core capabilities of asset management software
Across every asset-intensive industry, maximizing the value of assets creates value and provides a significant competitive edge. From energy and utilities and oil and gas to manufacturing, maintaining predictive oversight of an asset throughout its lifecycle can result in greater asset reliability and extends asset value.
In today’s modern era, the predictive management of resources cannot be overlooked. Higher costs of doing business require organizations to build agility and unify processes. Asset management software provides a robust set of capabilities that can be transformative to an asset-intensive organization.
These capabilities include:
- Work management: The ability to manage planned and unplanned maintenance tasks, from the initial request to its completion can result in a more streamlined work process, leading to increased productivity.
- Asset management: Accurate tracking of asset availability allows organizations from corrective maintenance to predictive maintenance. The latter ensures timely verification of asset failure. This achieves greater asset reliability and performance.
- Data auditing and tracking: The ability to make smarter decisions about your assets requires data. Asset management software gathers and analyzes historical data. Effective data management optimizes maintenance planning and scheduling.
- Supply chain management: Greater supply chain transparency enables organizations to identify breakdowns along the supply chain. Establishing supply chain visibility through an asset management solution enables organizations to develop smarter processes.
- Compliance: Adhering to appropriate regulations enables organizations to create a safer and more efficient operating environment. The use of asset management software ensures operations management complies with regulatory health and safety practices.
Better asset availability and extending asset value can only be realized with asset management software. The use of spreadsheets is an extremely time-consuming process. And as your assets grow to scale, spreadsheets become even more laborious and error-prone.
Unsure of the value that asset management software brings to your business? The leading asset management software provider in UAE highlights the five things your business has to consider to determine if it’s ready for asset management software.
Asset management has become resource-intensive
Businesses that grow at scale will find that data gathering can quickly become a resource-intensive process. The more assets your business obtains, the more resources you have to commit to data collection.
For businesses without an asset management program, this means depending on staff to resolve asset management issues. This practice of utilizing human resources becomes increasingly repetitive and is unsustainable.
Workers who are delegated to asset management increase operational costs and reduce operational productivity. Asset management software centralizes all of this data.
This automates repetitive asset management tasks, freeing workers to be more responsive to work requests. Workers who are free to perform predictive asset management are more capable of addressing critical information promptly, reducing the risk of asset failure.
What’s more, a more centralized database reduces dependence on human resources to oversee, track, and report assets and operational inventory.
Ghost assets are impacting the bottom line
Accountability and transparency are critical in asset management. In certain asset-intensive industries such as healthcare and law enforcement, missing assets can be potentially dangerous.
The loss of vital assets can drain an organization’s resources; chiefly, its time, energy, and money.
The disappearance of assets from the workplace can result in budgeting issues for future capital expenditures and unnecessarily high insurance premiums. This oversight can also contribute to workflow issues, impacting worker productivity.
In such industries, tracking every asset manually is a nearly impossible task. Implementing an asset management solution ensures greater accountability. Knowing where assets are at all times means loss is noticed immediately.
This discourages the misuse of assets and protects organizations from costly penalties.
A lack of accessibility
Across every industry, businesses must be able to implement agility into their business model to improve resource usage, increase workforce efficiency, and remain profitable.
Asset management software provides organizations with real-time insight and visibility into all assets in the organization’s overall supply chain. Having access to this data at all times is critical in monitoring asset reliability, usage, and productivity.
With virtually all physical assets accessible through one database, maintenance managers and other key stakeholders can effectively search for and locate assets whenever and wherever they need them.
This eliminates any potential asset “silos,” allowing more users to make informed decisions regarding asset usage.
Missing or non-existent quality control processes
The quality of a product or service is directly impacted by the reliability and performance of an asset or equipment. Extended downtime due to unscheduled asset failure can be expensive.
In the food and beverage industry, a large-scale equipment outage compromises health and safety standards. Unplanned asset failure not only increases maintenance spend but can also compromise the safety of consumers.
Inconsistencies in product quality can negatively impact consumer trust.
Stringent control processes are necessary for such industries to ensure compliance and consistent product quality. Having consistent real-time visibility allows organizations to anticipate asset maintenance and improve quality control processes.
Through asset management software, organizations can monitor how assets are performing. This reduces unscheduled downtimes and ensures quality issues are identified earlier.
Inconsistencies in maintenance practices
A maintenance program with well-documented procedures requires good data collection. Having documented standards on how maintenance tasks are performed ensure tasks are performed to the same degree of precision, standards and regulations are met, and scalable.
Through standardized maintenance procedures, organizations can eliminate siloed departments and improve validation costs and compliance costs.
Asset management solutions can provide management with a single, consolidated overview of all assets and facilities. This centralized view allows for better identification of issues and trends that may impact operational workflows and processes.
Conclusion
If your business has recently been challenged by such inefficiencies, then it may be time to implement an asset management solution.
However, this decision is not one to make lightly.
Certain factors, such as leadership buy-in and identifying the right product to deploy, are critical in the success of user adoption and realizing returns on investment.
Make some preliminary investigations into your company’s asset management requirements before you invest in a potential product. This ensures you make an accurate and informed decision — one that greatly improves its ability to effectively manage its assets.
AUTHOR BIO
Andrew Piechowiak is the General Manager – Asset Management Business at SGE Group International, a multidisciplinary group of companies with core business interests in Asset Lifecycle Management, Land Development and Software. Aladdin is SGE’s proprietary Asset Lifecycle Management software, designed to empower FM, Maintenance and Asset teams across multiple industry sectors.
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