Why is automated asset management important for your organization?
As businesses expand, they invest in more and more assets to up-size their resource portfolio. This hints at positive growth opportunities and increasing ROIs in the future. However, these ever-growing assets can get quite a handful to manage over time.
When your business operates in various locations and uses a multitude of tools, it’s easy to lose track of where your assets are. Up until recently, companies would store asset logs in spreadsheets, and track asset movements manually to manage their sizeable inventories.
It comes as no surprise that these manual asset management practices led to manager burnout. With manual documentation in place, managers had to deal with scores of scattered and outdated asset data, and shuffle through endless paper trails and spreadsheets.
When you enter data manually, you often lag behind actual business processes. This means you cannot keep tabs on asset movements in real-time. Without an accurate representation of your assets and processes, it is hard to get the right results from your business.
To overcome these challenges, many firms are now switching to automated asset management tools. Furthermore, regulatory authorities in many industries now mandate automated asset tracking methods.
These tools come equipped with the latest cloud technology so you can store all your asset data online. They eliminate the need for manual data entry by enabling you to track asset movements via unique barcode labels.
Every time an asset is checked-in or out of a location, the system automatically notifies you. Instant insights regarding your daily business activities help with informed decision making.
Moreover, most of these advanced asset management tools also allow you to assess the progress of your business by running an extensive analysis of your asset utilization trends.
What benefits do asset management tools offer?
Asset management tools come with a variety of benefits; automation of daily mundane tasks being the most important of them all. With automated asset management tools in place, you can leverage the following benefits.
- Continuous access to data: Compared to hardware storage mechanisms, cloud based tools are not affected by system breakdowns. The cloud is accessible from anywhere and at any time so employees don’t have to worry about losing data in the middle of a project.
- Automated software upgrades: Asset management tools feature automated upgrades and alert you whenever the system is about to undergo one. This keeps your management system up to speed with changing technological trends so to keep the system running as well.
- Effective security: Unlike paper documents that are prone to theft, your data is password-protected with cloud based management tools. In this way, only authorized employees have access to sensitive company data.
- Flexible capacity: Cloud based asset management tools are easier to scale up based on a business’s data storage needs. You don’t need to purchase extra filing cabinets, set up new software, or spend thousands on integrating your departments together.
Use asset management tools for an in-depth understanding of your business
Asset management tools can drastically help grow your business. They raise your operational efficiency, reduce system downtime, and lower maintenance costs, and all this boils down to smoother workflows!
For this reason, deploying automated asset management tools is more of a strategic decision. It’s critical to flesh out how to best use these features to meet your organizational goals.
Here are a couple of ways you can use asset management tools to gain in-depth insights about your business and make it more successful.
1. Take stock procurement decisions
Most businesses use a raft of tools and equipment to cater to the needs of different departments. But it’s important to run a need-based analysis of each department before you buy any equipment at all.
Once that’s done, set a minimum stock threshold level for each of your items and automate the procurement process. Whenever your inventory reaches this level, the system sends automated alerts to relevant vendors. This way, your stock is always replenished before it runs out. As a result, you will always meet production schedules.
2. Boost equipment uptime
Purchasing the right assets does not mean you’re out of the woods just yet. You need to make sure all your equipment is working at its best and has the lowest possible downtime. Apart from hefty repair costs, frequent breakdowns also truncate the useful life of an asset.
You can prevent this by scheduling regular repair sessions for each of your assets. Asset management tools accomplish this by scheduling your equipment for recurring services.
In this manner, identify assets that require more frequent repairs and either require immediate replacement or upgrades to boost their up-time.
3. Set replacement cycles
Every piece of equipment has a fixed useful life after which it needs to be disposed of. Using an obsolete tool doesn’t only bleed into delays in processes, it can also be a major health hazard. Therefore, it is imperative to run life cycle management for each asset and replace it when necessary.
Asset management tools enable you to run depreciation calculation for each item so you can estimate the right time for disposal. This, in turn, saves you from eye-watering upkeep costs for assets that are just not worth using.
4. Track asset locations
Perhaps the biggest challenge of managing inventory is to keep tabs on its whereabouts. You can sidestep this issue by using a dedicated asset management tool. It enables you to design unique barcode labels for each of your assets.
These tags assist employees while they check-in and check out assets to different locations. This way, you can clock in data about all your assets wherever they are, in a single database.
Additionally, more advanced asset management tools come saddled with GPS trackers that help you track asset movements of goods in transit. These systems act as watchtowers for your entire asset fleet and reduce the risk of theft and misplacement.
Devise long term strategies and gear your business towards higher levels of success
For advanced enterprise asset management, you need tools that gather actionable data for you. With automated asset management, run reports on asset utilization and rate of returns to glean insights on the current standing of your business. Furthermore, these reports zero in on the weak links in all your departments to realign your efforts.
Performance reports generated by asset management tools give you a bird’s eye view of your operations and associated costs. Use these insights to devise long term strategies for your business and gear it towards higher levels of success.
Read more: Asset Management Compliance – An Overview
About EZOfficeInventory!
EZOfficeInventory is the leading asset management software. It allows you to track, maintain and report on equipment from anywhere, at any time.
