12 Quick Tips About Asset Professionals

For many businesses, the efficient tracking of their installed base or in-service equipment, as well as the management of their spare parts inventories are important aspects in determining the prospects for internal productivity and customer support profitability. However, many organizations don't yet utilize a comprehensive asset tracking and management process to ensure the supply of quality data that can be used to generate the business intelligence that will ultimately save them money and improve efficiency. This is unfortunate, since the tools are readily available - it is simply a matter of making it a priority.

There are many definitions of "asset management", although most deal primarily with financial concerns. Some are according to evolving maintenance management systems; some on the management of factory floor equipment configurations; and some for the purpose of monitoring network equipment or maybe railway car and container locations. However, regardless of what situation or application your business deals with, the core definition remains constant; asset management is "a systematic process for identifying, cataloging, monitoring, maintaining, operating, upgrading and replacing the physical assets of the business on a cost-effective basis".

To be truly effective, the asset management process has to be built upon a foundation of commonly accepted accounting principles, and supported through the proper blend of sound business practices and financial acumen. It can provide management by having an effective tool that will be used to derive better short- and long-term planning decisions. Because of this, it is an element that every business should consider adopting - and embracing.

Poor asset management leads to poor data quality - and poor data quality can negatively affect the business over-time. In fact, experience shows that there are many of common causes that can lead to poor asset management, including lack of business controls for managing and/or updating asset data; lack of ownership for asset data quality; and an out-of-balance investment management in people, process, data and technology. Additionally, some businesses may not consider asset management to be a critical function, focusing on audits only; whilst some may not consider asset data to be an essential component of the business's intellectual property.

The primary symptoms of poor asset management are also fairly ubiquitous, and may include anything from numerous compliance and security issues, to uncontrollable capital and/or expense budgets, excessive network downtime and poor performance, under- or over-utilized assets, incompatible software applications, increasing operational costs and headcount, and non-matching asset data produced from different organizations and/or business systems.

What's more, poor ongoing asset management practices can impact a business by degrading customer service delivery, polluting the current installed base of data and distracting sales resources with customer data issues One example is Service Delivery could be impaired by inaccurate depot sparing creating customer entitlement issues, increasing escalations to upper management and lowering client satisfaction. An uncertain installed base lengthens contract renewal cycle-time, limits revenue opportunities and inhibits technology refresh planning.