Asset management is a process that involves maintaining and monitoring assets of a business. Companies have both tangible assets and intangible assets and asset tracking can be applied to tangible assets like company cars, equipment, land, buildings, inventory, cash at bank, cash in hand and even to intangible assets like computerized databases, website, software, domain names, patent technology and brand.
Asset management includes reliability checking, tracking leased and rented assets, performing predictive and preventive maintenance, retrieving and assigning assets together along with business intelligence and analytical features. It enables you to track and record the life cycle of an asset: upgrading, maintaining, operating, deploying and finally disposing of an asset. As soon as the asset is deployed, asset tracking software keeps a record of all its maintenance events and allows an organization to perform regular audits till the asset actually retires.
Asset tracking software can be used by a multitude of businesses and industries like healthcare, IT, education, hospitality, media, nonprofit, government agencies, and many others. You’re familiar with some of the general functions of asset tracking software but how does it read across different industries? Different industries mold and utilize this software according to their functionalities and operations. Below we have enlisted five industries that make use of asset tracking software while promoting efficiency and accuracy in their businesses.
Education industry
The increase in the number of schools and colleges today have increased the substantial amount of assets that are divided among different departments, zones, buildings, multiple classrooms, and campuses. When taking care of educational assets like projectors, books, lab equipment, computers, laptops, furniture and other educational tools, it is vital to track your assets from procurement to retirement.
Even if you are responsible for a single school, you need to account for every chair, desk, and laptop.
Educational asset management systems that are easy to use, helps you to assign assets to students and faculty by keeping a check on them along with the ability to move assets amongst people or within location using mobile devices. Laptops, tablets, and projectors are great learning tools but are costly. It is important to make sure these items are tracked effectively using automated check-in/check-out feature.
It becomes simple and easy for educational institutes to control inventory and manage asset information simply through websites or mobiles devices. Barcode scanning lets you get access to the status of each and every asset which makes it easy to track misplaced or lost items. It also keeps track of inventory in real-time and expenditure control on assets. This helps the staff to focus more towards educating students than being all worried about where or with whom the educational tools are!
Read more: Here’s how inventory control software improves education
Hospitality industry
The hospitality industry offers all kinds of accommodations via motels, resorts, hotels, condos, RV parks and, bed and breakfasts. Each of these lodging establishments contains various departments with countless assets to track. Housekeeping, dining and leisure, grounds, engineering, accounting, and administration are just a few of them. These departments are never going to work efficiently together without computerized management software like asset tracking software.
Hospitality and hotel asset tracking software offers an automated and centralized data bank for each and every asset of a hotel. You will have to label and store items neatly for every department of the hotel. If you want to ensure maximum optimization for your assets, then you must account for ground care, front desk, office supply, engineering, house keeping, and even all your furniture items. It will definitely save money that you will otherwise have to spend on replacements and repairs.
Using asset tracking software, you can make customized labels for all your items with barcodes containing the needed information. Whether you want to know where in housekeeping a recent shipment of sheets and pillows was placed or who rented equipment in the engineering department, asset tracking software communicates it all for you. You will be successful in managing assets in hospitality industry if you hold your staff accountable and responsible for hotel property – no matter which department they are working in.
Read More: 5 Ways to Increase Asset Visibility using IT Asset Management Software
Healthcare industry
The healthcare industry has unique challenges at their disposal. Doctor’s offices, health care outlets, and hospitals cater countless equipment, devices and medical assets that need to be managed and tracked. Innumerable tools and devices are required by every physician and doctor in order to offer the best in patient care. A hospital asset management software helps you keep all your focus on patient care.
Asset tracking improves patient care by letting you locate the right medical equipment at the right time.
There are so many times when patients have to needlessly wait when the staff is unable to locate equipment. It is not only frustrating but also dangerous for the patients. Asset tracking software automatically monitors the location and status of assets. Asset management minimizes the time spent by staff in looking for, cleaning, maintaining and delivering equipment using real-time status and location of equipment.
Critical medical assets and devices like heart monitors, wheelchairs, beds, IV pumps, patient blood bags or any other thing that has high monetary value or influences patient outcome can be easily tracked with real-time visibility of each and every item. This enhances equipment utilization and minimizes penalties. Immediate access to medical equipment also improves the overall experience of a patient. With mobile view analytics dashboard, asset tracking software gives you even better operational insight into inventory location and quantity.
Read more: How Hospitals Can Streamline With Equipment Tracking Software
Construction industry
It is the construction industry that hammers out the foundation of societies in every era. Construction projects are not limited to managing foremen, builders, and surveyors. There is a mountain of equipment that needs to be distributed, procured and maintained on a regular basis. Construction site happens to be endued with a challenging environment when it comes to managing and tracking equipment. It is faced with labor inefficiencies, receiving and shipping inaccuracies, data tampering, and theft.
There is a dire need to track and manage construction equipment. As a matter of fact, most of the challenges encountered by construction industry centers around use and management of assets. The equipment needs to function well along with being available when and where it is needed. With a huge variety of equipment at hand, they can be damaged, left behind – lost in transit or on a construction site. These losses can accumulate and become a mountain of problems for a construction business.
There are budgets limits, safety concerns to be addressed and strict schedules to be met. Asset tracking software can solve all these issues boldly. Work order delays can be avoided using robust availability calendar, theft and loss can be discouraged through regular data logging and malfunctioning equipment can be taken in for repairs quickly.
Tracking of an assigned equipment or a consumable item is extremely important at the construction site as well as the warehouse. To ensure data accuracy, you need a system that can streamline your tracking processes. A construction asset tracking system can minimize paper work, improve accountability across the organization, reduce excess purchases, and improve maintenance accuracy.
Read more: Why your Construction Firm Needs Tool Inventory Management
IT industry
If you want your IT department optimized with a streamlined process and asset management, the answer is to implement asset tracking software across your organization. An IT administrator needs to know all the inventory available in the enterprise. Tracking IT assets can become challenging particularly when you have all your computers installed in different branch offices. Manual tracking of IT assets can be error prone, time-consuming and resource intensive.
An IT asset tracking software can keep you updated on software and hardware inventory in your company. You will have all the data on your organizational software and hardware assets at your fingertips. You can keep track of all your hardware assets including serial port, processor, IDE controller, battery, sound device, monitor, and others. You can have the data in the form of reports.
An IT asset tracking software periodically scans servers in the network and gathers inventory details of the software installed and its usage pattern. You will not only be able to maintain a complete inventory of all your firewalls, virtual machines, computer components, routers and workstations but also be able to perform individual asset scans to find out any software or hardware changes such as upgrades, updates or patches. An IT asset management solution also enables you to schedule periodic scans on your network to find out any newly added workstations and can notify the technicians about any latest updates. You can even analyze trends on incidents of a particular workstation with complete information, changes, and problems related to it.
Read More: Benefits of IT Asset Management – A good idea for businesses
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