Asset Managements has become a big concern for organizations, especially the field service ones. Want to know why? Because assets drive business. Today’s field businesses rely heavily on physical assets to survive and succeed effectively. Therefore, keeping track of all the assets has become more than crucial. With asset management software, businesses can derive more value from their assets and achieve their goals efficiently.
Although the concept of asset management has already been in existence for several decades, it continues to evolve with time and technology. Therefore, firms should invest in a reliable asset management suite to stay abreast with the evolution and adapt to the ongoing changes.
When it comes to building a workflow for asset management, the same can be a little complex.
With an asset management workflow, you can manage all the assets across the organization effectively. Additionally, it helps organizations to understand their objectives and long-term asset management strategy.
In this article, you’ll help you learn the steps involved in effective asset planning, ranging from completing an asset inventory to financial planning. So, here we go:
Complete an asset inventory
The first thing you need to do to manage assets well is knowing what assets you have. Before creating a plan for effective asset management, take a precise look at the entire asset inventory and check all the assets you have in your organization. This will serve as the foundation of your plan. While checking the inventory, ensure to fetch all information regarding:
- What assets you have
- Where they are
- What values do they hold at the given time
- When they were purchased
- What their expected life-cycles are
Determine their life-cycle costs
To make the workflow as accurate as possible, calculate the entire life-cycle costs of all the assets, not only the amount at what you purchased them initially. During the working life of an asset, it undergoes several minor to major repairs that add much to its maintenance costs. Even when they are done serving their purpose, its farewell also includes disposal costs. To ensure the accuracy of your asset management plan, don’t forget to consider life-cycle costs along with the purchasing ones.
Levels of service
By using levels of service, you can categorize assets based on their quality, function, capacity, and safety. This will also help you dictate the type and amount of maintenance or service each category of assets requires. To create the levels of service, consider the following things:
The level of service you’re currently providing
How that level of service is expected to evolve over time
The yearly cost of current services provided
If enough financial support is available to meet any change in service
If the current level of service is fulfilling the needs and expectations of users.
Cost-effective management
Are you investing in predictive maintenance or not? Most organizations have several assets, and with predictive maintenance, they can avoid assets’ breakdown and downtime in production or delay in services. With predictive maintenance, instead of waiting for a small issue to become a blunder, the same can be fixed early. This way, the issue is fixed without spending more money. This is a crucial part of cost-effective management when maintenance is done prior to any issue occurring. This also enhances the working life of the assets.
Dwelling on long-term financial planning
With the right asset management software in hand, you can maintain the assets well and get support for long-term financial planning. This will help you determine which of your goals are more feasible to achieve shortly and which needs assets over the long term.
The Importance of Asset Management Software
With an asset management suite at your disposal, you can resolve the biggest issues of asset management involved with monitoring and managing existing assets manually. Here are some of the pain points in manual asset management that the asset management software can resolve:
- Manual data entry, inaccurate data, and error-ridden processes.
- The unorganized asset management process.
- Lack of authorization to enforce asset management policies.
- Bad change management.
- Poor or no tracking and reporting of real-time asset value and location.
- Incapability to determine the potential data risk or prevent it.
The software can automate asset management workflow, and you can eliminate the time involved in trying to complete basic and repetitive asset management tasks manually. It will allow businesses to streamline tedious and time-consuming asset management activities offering the managers or administration team to concentrate more on value-added activities that help them stay abreast of the competition in the long run.
Final Thoughts
Successful asset management is vital to any organization as it helps them streamline the most repetitive and tedious tasks and focus on the important ones. Additionally, the software helps them keep a tab on every asset’s real-time location and operation, which further helps in predictive maintenance. The more complex the organization, the more crucial it is to have a powerful asset management system in place.