Every company needs to keep track of its assets. However, not every business has full visibility over their assets’ performance history, reliability and lifecycle. This often means businesses aren’t getting the most out of their assets and aren’t able to make well informed decisions when it comes to upgrading.
Traditional asset management is paper focused and relies on bulky filing systems that make it difficult to access important information quickly, which can eat into schedules and budgets.
The pandemic put urgency around modernising this often chaotic process and forced companies to rethink how they handled asset management.
Enter next generation asset management.
What is asset management?
In the traditional sense, asset management is a system that helps companies keep track of assets such as vehicles, equipment and other valuable investments.
Keeping track of these assets' use, reliability and lifecycle helps streamline operations, especially in relation to their sale or disposal.
Put simply, asset management is the process of developing, operating, maintaining and selling assets cost-effectively.
Why is asset management important?
Asset management makes it easy for organisations to keep track of their assets. Owners know where assets are, how they are being used and if changes are being/ have been made. As a result, organisations can recover assets more efficiently, record financial statements more accurately and eliminate lost, damaged or stolen assets from their systems in a timelier manner. It also helps businesses identify and manage risks from utilising and owning certain assets.
Asset management records all key info in a central database so organisations can easily access all the necessary information. By keeping tabs on assets throughout their lifecycle, businesses can improve their process of acquiring and utilising assets. Therefore, companies can identify wasteful purchasing practices and develop new and better ones.
What is next generation asset management?
Next generation asset management is a new model of asset management based on systems thinking principles that can provide significantly greater value than the traditional approaches used by most organisations.
This new approach to asset management represents the intersection of asset management with IT processes and disciplines, including configuration management, workflow, analytics, and data sharing. Essentially, this approach views assets not as just objects that require lifecycle management in terms of cost, maintenance, and ownership – but as contributing performers to a business’ services.
Once you understand assets in terms of performance history, it can help you resolve issues more quickly. If an asset is a regular poor performer, you may want to retire it early. Alternatively, if you find a product works better and lasts longer than others, it may help inform your investment decisions in the future.
Next generation asset management characteristics:
- Focuses functional data on individual assets – Helps to identify asset cost/ reliability over lifecycle.
- Takes data from any functional system to obtain new insights.
- Focus on managing risk over cost – The negative impact of asset failure can be more significant than cost reductions.
- Incorporation of new technologies – Smart sensors, AI and other technologies provide added data and analytic opportunities.
As a result, this new model better responds to client needs, offers greater scalability, and takes full advantage of data, analytics and technology advances. Without a solid Asset Management system, businesses can find it hard to upload, organise, locate and deploy assets when necessary.
Understand your assets
Piles of paperwork and filing cabinets filled to the brim with all sorts of information about every product in your inventory can make it difficult to wrap your head around what’s happening in your business.
By adopting next generation asset management systems, you can streamline your asset management procedures, compiling all the relevant information for individual assets in a way that’s easy to access and utilise across your business.
Using Formitize’s smart, mobile and fully integrated next generation asset management system, you can centralise your asset database, register all your assets and key details for each individual asset, automate your assets usage processes and access all this information anytime and anywhere.
Book a demo or start a free trial and see how Formitize can help your business become a smarter business.
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