What is equipment tracking and who needs it?

It wouldn’t be a surprise to you if we were to suggest that the equipment your organisation uses will always play an integral role in its success. It is therefore important to responsibly manage and maintain your physical assets or equipment – and in order to do that, you will need to have a means of tracking them.

What is equipment tracking?

The term ‘equipment tracking’, then, simply refers to the process by which this is done. Instead of depending on spreadsheets or even ‘pen and paper’, today’s successful organisations tend to use some kind of tagging or barcode technology to document all the physical assets they own.

After all, your personnel will need to know key information about those assets – such as each piece of equipment’s location, condition, maintenance history, and so on. When such information is maintained in a centralised platform that your staff can quickly and easily refer to at any time, you will be able to help ensure your business’s continued smooth operations, day by day.

For these reasons, a wide range of organisations and businesses should be paying close attention to their own asset tracking arrangements, and what they could do to streamline them. It could save your own business from having to invest quite so much time and money in manual labour for the management of its assets – but what else do you need to know about this crucial process?

What can you track with equipment tracking?

Take a moment to think about all the equipment your organisation depends on to fuel its success; all the computers, IT equipment, production equipment, copiers, printers, furniture, and even safety equipment, to cite just a few examples.

These are just some of the types of physical asset that equipment tracking technology can be used to keep track of. Doing so will help ensure you are organised and proactive in the management and maintenance of these pieces of equipment, including dealing with the associated costs and how they are used to help make your business successful.

What are the best ways to track equipment?

As we touched on earlier, there is more than one potential way to track your organisation’s assets, although some will likely be more suitable than others.

The size of your business will probably be one of the factors determining the suitability of a given method – what works for a small business wishing to track its equipment, might not be so appropriate for a global firm that has multiple sites in each country it needs to manage.

So, what are some of the technologies that are often used by organisations in the tracking of their assets?

• GPS – The term ‘GPS’ refers to ‘Global Positioning System’; many companies have long used GPS devices for the tracking of mobile assets, such as construction equipment or vehicles. GPS trackers can be used to keep an eye on exactly where these particular assets are at any one time. This, in turn, could also aid communication with colleagues who might have encountered an obstacle.

• RFID – Radio-frequency identification technology, also often referred to as ‘RFID’, is a type of wireless communication that allows for the unique identification of objects. RFID tags are crucial to this; they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and they can be especially useful if a business needs to track what are often called ‘movable assets’; in other words, assets that can be easily moved in and out of a company’s premises. The tags are simply attached to the surface of the given assets to enable their identification and tracking.

• Barcodes – Barcode or QR code technology provides a proven means of keeping track of an organisation’s physical equipment. Any one of us who has ever walked into a retail store has some level of familiarity with barcodes, and there is no question that they are both affordable and easy to use for organisations. The use of accompanying software allows for a barcode to be scanned, so that the information it contains about a given asset can be easily read.

What are the benefits of equipment tracking?

Not knowing what is going on with your organisation’s assets – whether in relation to their location, condition, maintenance needs, or other factors – is likely to greatly hamstring your business’s efforts to survive and grow.

Here are just some of the reasons why your business should always be looking at how it can optimise its systems for equipment tracking:

• Lower labour costs – Having asset tracking software in place takes away the need for quite so much manual tracking and management of your organisation’s equipment. The need for human intervention won’t go away entirely, of course, but the use of such technology will save you from having to employ people to do certain asset tracking work. It will also help minimise the scope for damaging human error.

• Better tracking of losses and profit – Your business not tracking its assets at all – or perhaps only doing so in a relatively rudimentary or ‘ad-hoc’ way – heightens the risk of it effectively incurring some losses that it isn’t even aware of. Putting in place sophisticated equipment tracking technology will help banish the issue of ‘ghost’ or ‘zombie’ assets, and maximise transparency and accountability.

• Improved service – Always knowing where your organisation’s equipment is – and not only that, but also its condition and accessibility – will have a positive knock-on effect on the service that you provide to customers or clients. After all, it will help ensure the more efficient and trouble-free operation of your company in general, and that can only be good news for everyone who comes into contact with your business.

• Ability to get a real-time overview – Today’s industry-leading asset tracking software packages, using tagging technology such as RFID, provide a single, centralised place for your staff to record, track, trace, and monitor all the organisation or site’s assets. The latest information about those assets can be provided via a convenient dashboard, so that their status at any given time can be easily known.

Using software for equipment tracking

If your organisation isn’t presently using software for its asset tracking, it might be the right time to investigate the solutions out there that could help you make this transition. Indeed, amid ever-intensifying time and cost pressures on businesses, there might have never been a time when it was of more urgent importance for your organisation to make this switch.

The totally secure and cloud-based Vision Pro software, for example, draws upon a dedicated mobile app and Vision-tag (RFID or Near Field Communication) technology to help make the tagging and tracking of assets so much quicker and easier.

Our asset management platform could be instrumental in your organisation’s efforts – in 2022 and into 2023 – to manage its equipment more easily and efficiently, with all the benefits this could have for your broader business operations. To find out more about this renowned solution and to book a demo, please don’t wait any longer to call the Vision Pro team.