Asset Management Trends
January, 2010
Organizations need automated asset recording, tracking and management in this uncertain environment.
For the past several years of economic uncertainty, organizations have especially tried to account for and exploit their investment in physical assets. Consequently, they have turned to automated asset recording and tracking (among other business intelligence tools) to diminish the cost associated with asset management, to lower risk, while minimizing time needed to properly report information.
With diminishing workforce numbers, in physically dispersed locations and other active organizational changes plus stricter control requirements, manual processes to track physical assets may be unacceptably prolonged, protracted and even inaccurate.
- Manual processes are time-consuming — In a dynamically changing environment, it is challenging and time-consuming to manually update the asset database every time a new piece of hardware is purchased, installed or removed or a hardware item changes. Without recurrent updates, the utility of the information about those assets declines in significance and simply put…becomes less useful.
- Management reports and decisions—Asset managers can typically avail themselves of a fair amount of asset records – but conscientious analysis of that data is key for taking important actions. Up-to-date counts of physical assets, age, condition, cost and value analysis, are essential.
- Manual processes are costly — Ensuring that asset data is correct and consistent can entail a lot of procedure and effort, both to initialize the process and more importantly to update it periodically. This effort can involve significant time and could be rather costly.
- Need for a single, accurate asset database — It’s important that organizations maintain some central asset management database to store information of various kinds – even if departments or divisions also maintain their own data This information is critical to make strategic decisions for the entire organization including efficient asset management, accurate planning for upcoming projects, and for identifying and extracting potential asset savings.
As a result of external uncertainties and desire for greater understanding of and control over physical assets, organizations should move to automated asset tracking to optimize asset levels, reduce risk and manage or reduce asset management costs.
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