Today’s business environments consist of innumerable moving parts and interdependencies, which is why asset management has become essential for minimising risk.
Every business consists of four fundamental components – people, assets, finance, and time. These collaborate to produce information that requires governance, hence the PAFTCIG model.
Assets make up one of the four fundamental components of every business. An organisation’s ability to grow and thrive depend heavily on the optimal management of all assets, from machinery to data systems to raw materials and everything in between.
Today’s businesses consist of practically innumerable moving parts operating over constantly expanding and evermore complex supply chains. Assets may be either physical or digital in nature, ranging from mission-critical to ancillary in their roles – but they all need management in order to reduce risk and continuously enhance efficiency.
That’s where enterprise asset management software comes in.
What is enterprise asset management?
Enterprise asset management (EAM) refers to a combination of business strategies, services, and systems used to maintain and control operational equipment and resources. Traditionally, EAM encompassed physical assets, but it has since come to incorporate digital assets too in the era of digitally transformed businesses. These days, EAM often includes everything from vehicles and warehousing facilities to raw materials and information itself.
EAM doesn’t refer to a particular product or brand. Rather, it is an all-encompassing term that means different things to different organisations. For example, a logistics company might look to fleet management software, since its vehicles are likely its most important assets. A factory, on the other hand, might consider asset management in terms of tracking and maintaining the equipment on its shop floor. However, EAM has an important role to play in every industry.
Here are some of the most important benefits of enterprise asset management:
1. Keep track of mission-critical assets
Asset management is the holistic process of overseeing the control and management of high-value assets – i.e. those that are critical to the normal operations of your business. One of the key components of EAM is asset tracking, which is all about understanding where your assets are, where they’ve been, and where they’re going. To that end, asset tracking plays a vital role in reducing loss and theft of critical assets.
Asset tracking is particularly important in the era of highly complex global supply chains, where businesses need to ensure the consistent flow of goods to maintain employee productivity and keep customers happy. Asset tracking plays a major role in areas like fleet management and logistics, as well as for managing perishable goods like food products and medicines. With a tiered asset registry, you can effectively trace your assets, manage your field workers, and schedule maintenance regimes.
2. Improve operational efficiency
Diligent asset management can help organisations achieve optimal equipment utilisation by making it easier to keep track of key performance and availability metrics. With total visibility into your organisation’s assets, you can enjoy a big-picture view of how your assets perform their roles and where any opportunities for improvement lie. Armed with the ability to analyse asset-related data at scale, you can make informed decisions when it comes to replacements and upgrades.
Since asset management also gives you a complete history of your assets, from acquisition to end-of-life, you will also have an accurate assessment of cost efficiency and return on investment. That way, you can more effectively forecast future budgets when making changes to your operational infrastructure. For example, if certain machines are causing a performance bottleneck and not delivering a satisfactory ROI, asset management means you’ll be able to identify them immediately.
3. Enhance regulatory compliance
Many industry-specific regulations place strict rules on the handling of certain assets, such as those that may have a detrimental effect on health or the environment should they be lost or misused. For example, manufacturers must pay close attention to health and safety on shop floors, and that means promptly addressing issues with dangerous machinery.
A digital EAM allows you to achieve complete accuracy and visibility over your asset portfolio. Such systems can generate comprehensive reports at the tap of a button and deliver powerful insights at scale in a way that pen and paper-based systems simply cannot. This way, you can easily scale your compliance and security initiatives and demonstrate your efforts to stakeholders and customers alike.
4. Proactively maintain equipment
Proactive maintenance is one of the fundamentals of running a successful business, especially in sectors that rely heavily on expensive proprietary machinery – such as manufacturing and healthcare. It goes without saying that proper maintenance is vital for ensuring the continuing operations of the business without compromising safety and security. By making it possible to track your equipment and other assets throughout their lifecycles, you will know when it is time to call in maintenance teams or retire aging assets.
Beyond the legal requirements governing the management and maintenance of certain asset types, properly documenting your equipment also reduces lost and minimises risk of failures. For example, if a particular piece of equipment breaks down whilst still under warranty, having the necessary operational records at your disposal will help ensure you’re able to cash in on any claim you might have to make.
5. Ensure long-term system integrity
Asset management is a vital component of any broader risk-management strategy. To that end, the aforementioned benefits combine to reduce risk across your organisation and uphold the ongoing integrity of your operations. By choosing a platform that offers native integration with human resources management and other back-office systems, you can more effectively assign the right people to the right tasks and find out instantly who is responsible for which assets.
Finally, your asset management regime should also incorporate facilities management. After all, warehouses, offices, data centres, and shop floors are all assets in their own right as well. And, just like any other asset, they need to be monitored and maintained to provide a clear picture on the performance and integrity of your business operations.
C-ASSET is a mobile workforce and asset management platform that helps businesses of all sizes with resource planning, asset tracking, and more. It is part of the ContinuSys integrated business management system. Sign up today to start your free trial.