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The importance of an organisation responsibly managing its tangible assets cannot be doubted. There may be much greater uncertainty, however, about the asset management strategies that firms across the industry sectors would be best-advised to adopt.
Unfortunately, this has led many an organisation to have second thoughts about the notion of modernising their asset management approach at all.
So, in this article we’ll take a closer look at the truly positive difference effective asset management can make, and the strategies that can give all manner of businesses much-improved results from their asset management.
What is asset management?
The term ‘asset management’ refers to the process by which an organisation manages its physical assets. This encompasses a wide range of vital procedures, including the recording, tracking and monitoring of assets’ condition, location and usability.
Why is asset management important?
Even today, it remains all too easy for many organisations to dismiss the importance of optimising their asset management approach. This situation may arise for a wide range of reasons, such as a mistaken belief that investing in this aspect of their operations would be too expensive, or that an asset management system based on paper or spreadsheets is perfectly adequate.
Some organisations may even lack anything resembling a coherent asset management policy at all, perhaps still convinced of the merits of the ‘manual’ or ‘ad-hoc’ approach.
The increasingly inescapable truth for today’s businesses, however, is that some kind of formalised asset management system is essential in order to boost efficiency and productivity, and guard against various business risks.
If your business doesn’t have a systemised approach in place for the management and monitoring of its physical assets, you are likely to find it much harder to keep your company’s assets in optimal and usable condition, or even to know where they are on-site. As a consequence, those assets – including crucial day-to-day equipment for your company’s operations – may be more easily compromised in their performance and susceptible to unexpected downtime.
Such issues, in turn, can greatly damage your bottom line and act as a drag on its growth potential. So, with the vital role of asset management now established, how can you make this process serve your organisation’s wider objectives?
What asset management strategies can you implement in your business?
Track and enhance the asset life cycle
One of the most powerful reasons to incorporate asset management strategies into how your business operates, is the opportunity to significantly boost the longevity of your company’s physical assets.
The live data that cloud-based asset management software – such as our Vision solution here at Assets & Compliance Managed Services UK – can provide can assist organisations like yours with their implementation of an effective asset lifecycle plan and maintenance schedule. This, in turn, can help keep key equipment delivering optimal performance for the business for longer, without the need for frequent and costly replacement.
Understand asset depreciation
The overall value of a given asset – such as a vital machine or other piece of equipment – is liable to decrease over time. Ambitious businesses need to account for the true worth a particular tangible asset has to the organisation gradually lowering with the passing of the months and years – for example, due to becoming outdated with the advancement of technology.
A sophisticated asset management platform, with the scope it offers for keeping track of the condition and value of your assets over time, will greatly help your personnel to understand the depreciation of important assets. As a consequence, they will be in a position to make better-informed decisions on such ongoing matters as the maintenance and replacement of key equipment.
Preventative maintenance
We have already touched on the importance of putting in place a maintenance schedule for your organisation’s assets. By this, we are talking about planned maintenance, as opposed to the reactive maintenance to which your company is likely to be accustomed from every past occasion when essential equipment has suddenly ground to a halt.
Asset management software like the Vision platform can play an imperative role in ensuring that your organisation targets its preventative maintenance effectively. As the term ‘preventative’ indicates, this is the form of maintenance aimed at identifying and resolving any emerging issues with your assets, to minimise the likelihood of much bigger problems in the future.
Set a quarterly, half-yearly, yearly goal
Implementing an asset management system – or bringing your organisation’s existing one firmly into the 2020s – will allow you to make more sophisticated decisions with regard to the management, maintenance, replacement and acquisition of assets.
Whatever processes you do put into motion in relation to your organisation’s assets, it’s a good idea to set short-term, mid-term and long-term goals. After certain segments of time have elapsed – such as a quarter, six months, or 12 months – top management at your company should reflect on whether these objectives have been achieved in the intended timeframe.
If managers come to the conclusion that those goals have not been reached, they will need to ask why, and devise or optimise business processes to boost efficiency and minimise any future wastage of time and money.
Utilise cloud-based asset management software
We have already mentioned that technology is constantly evolving, which has the effect of causing your assets to depreciate over time. Well, this is a principle that you must also consider with regard to your asset management system itself, and any tools you may have acquired to make the process easier.
Today, it is cloud-based asset management technology that is especially helping businesses from across the industries to remain ahead of their competitors in how they record, track, trace and monitor their assets.
This is not least because a cloud-based system – as Assets & Compliance Managed Services UK’s Vision is – allows for information about an organisation’s assets to be accessed at any time, from practically anywhere. Furthermore, the leading cloud systems offer exacting standards of data security, and are not prone in the same way to disasters such as fire that – in the case of paper-based arrangements – could result in the complete destruction of an organisation’s asset register. And finally, with prior authorisation, you can have as many different people – staff, contractors, services personnel, etc. – feed into the software, allowing you the flexibility of using your own preferred organisations or employees to help you maintain your Assets Register.
Final thoughts
Far from being luxurious extras or mere ‘nice to have’ elements of your business, the right asset management strategies can be fundamental to the optimisation of your company’s day-to-day operations in the 2020s – upping efficiency, productivity and revenue.
Furthermore, the most suitable asset management platform will make it so much easier for your organisation to get the best out of its existing assets, purchase the right assets for the future, and reduce costs. To talk to our experts at Assets & Compliance Managed Services UK about how our Vision software could be central to your business’s efforts to better manage its assets for months and years to come, please do not hesitate to reach out to us by phone or email today