Using Asset Tracking Software to Leverage Locations

Leveraging locations with asset tracking software

In an increasingly globalized world, businesses have to keep track of a growing number of locations. Whether they relate to different corporate offices and departments, or warehouses and storage units, it’s in the interest of every business to pay specific attention to all the locations relevant to it. This can help them create more efficient workflows, and save time and money, all at the same time!

Asset tracking software is an exceptionally useful tool in this context. Not only does it help with location management, but it also enables companies to create associations around these locations and the people and equipment situated there. This in turn lends itself to an improved managerial ecosystem, where optimizations in a single area build on and improve the productivity of other areas. This post will detail the ways in which asset tracking software is able to help businesses leverage location management in order to reap all these benefits.

See the ‘big picture’ through parent-child associations

Most businesses, no matter how small, have different locations associated with their operations. This could include places they store inventory or raw materials, office complexes for employees, labs, construction sites, or different buildings separated by function. These can be a hassle to manage, especially if you want some sort of centralized authority overlooking each of them. Team cohesiveness can therefore be a bit of a problem if a company’s operations are spread across a number of locations.

This is why it’s important to organize these locations. This can be done through simple parent-child hierarchies which can be as comprehensive as needed. The great thing about asset tracking software is that you can add unlimited locations and associations of this kind, so you can can track a piece of inventory from a certain city, to a street, a warehouse, aisle, shelf, all the way down to a specific toolbox! This kind of nuanced location management helps you see the big picture a lot more clearly.

Scan location barcodes to speed up processing

A robust asset tracking system will have thought out the workflows most used by its customers, and deployed solutions to common problems arising out of them. Location barcode scanning is one of those solutions. Say you’re using the system to check items into a specific location – for example, a collection of AV gear being checked back in to the store room after it’s back from a specific studio shoot. Rather than manually typing in the location each time you check an item back into the store room, you could simply scan a location label to get the job done in no time!

This label could be placed in a convenient location such as the entrance to a room, or even put down after every few shelves, and can help you keep up with complex location labeling practices quickly and painlessly!

Location insights help streamline the way you distribute equipment across locations.

Be thorough by outlining location-based audits

Audits are all important if your company wants to keep costs low and ROIs high. The benefits of regular audits are fairly extensive; they keep employees accountable, help you focus on productive assets, and establish useful routines around asset maintenance.

Of course, one of the main reasons people use audits is to ensure certain business premises such as factories or warehouses are complying with different regulations. To do this, you’d need to do an audit of the premises, and ensure you’re keeping track of all the different elements making up this task, such as checking temperature and humidity levels, cleaning out filters, or doing roof inspections, etc. To this end, you could use asset tracking software to create work orders. This will help you carry out location-specific audits quickly, while also making it very easy to log all the data relating to that audit, such as the time remaining before completion, or whether or not a certain task has been reviewed by a supervisor.

Document the transfer of stock so you’re always up-to-date

Companies can have a lot of equipment, and a lot of locations between which that equipment needs to be distributed and redistributed regularly. No doubt, some businesses have experienced nightmare scenarios where equipment from one department has been handed over to another, or recently transferred stock has been listed as missing rather than moved.

This is why it’s crucial that businesses have a seamless way of moving equipment between locations, and accounting for these moves by not just logging this information, but also making the requisite changes on all other places on the system. For example, say some chemicals are moved from cold storage in one location, to a lab in another. Not only should the asset tracking system record this transfer, but it should also update stock levels in the lab, and deduct the same stock from the cold storage. Easy cross-location inventory control such as this can significantly optimize business processes.

Get insights on business locations for continued improvement

Locations are important not just for all the equipment they contain, but also to map out proximity to other locations, employees, and opportunities. In this way, rather than thinking of them as static areas, businesses need to start thinking of them as dynamic spaces whose scope changes with changing business workflows.

For example, say you deliver a set of equipment to four different sites every day, but need to deliver to an additional site moving forward. Rather than taking the same route you always do, it would be common sense to consult a map and take the most efficient route instead. Think of asset tracking software as a large scale version of this! Using reports and analytics, you can make better decisions based on information that is not just more accurate, but also treats locations as dynamic entities that shift their meaning based on the associations they have at any given time!

Conclusion

Location management is great for businesses wanting to make things more efficient across multiple locations. Asset tracking software that supports this kind of location management not only makes cross-location communication a lot easier, but also helps businesses speed up processing times, keep better documentation, and carry out painless audits. This is useful not just for businesses that have hundreds of locations to manage, but also smaller operations that have different areas of interest, such as an IT department, or the company garage or canteen, each of which could become its own location under the system. Therefore, location management could be a core strength for a lot of different businesses, helping them increase efficiency and lower overheads in one go!