Choosing Asset Management Software

Choosing asset management software to manage your important assets and equipment can be daunting. There are so many options on the market, and what works for one organisation may not be the right choice for you.

Evaluating asset management software is time-consuming, especially if you’re a bit unsure of what you need. In this blog, we will discuss in point form the important aspects to take into consideration when choosing asset management software to purchase for your organisation.

Efficiency is doing things right while effectiveness is doing the right things says Peter Drucker, often touted as the father of modern management. While improving efficiency means doing things faster, using fewer resources, in fewer steps, effectiveness means aligning improvements to the way you work to high-level corporate goals. Instead of efficiency for efficiency’s sake, increasing effectiveness requires taking a more focused and strategic approach.

Tips On Choosing The Right Asset Management Software

• Choose a system that provides real-time access to the various departments responsible for supervising the resources across the enterprise.

• The system you choose should work as a smooth communication channel among the stakeholders, consumers, and business owners.

• You must have a clear view of what you want to accomplish with your asset management software. Prepare a list of all short term or long-term objectives.

• Compare prices of various software packages and understand what is included and how that aligns with what you want to accomplish.

• Research both the reputation and experience of the software developer. An established asset tracking and management software provider are more likely to be able to offer continuing support.

• Ensure that the asset management software package you are looking to buy is compatible with the technology used in your organisation and can integrate with your exisiting system(s).

• Choose an asset management software solution that incorporates easy to use dashboards and smartphone apps, for better user engagement.

• Selecting easy to understand software, whose functionalities are not extremely complicated to operate, will reduce the time and cost of training your employees and encourages employees to interact more with the solution.

• Analyse whether you want to host the asset management software on your own server or cloud-based server.

• Ensure that the asset management software package allows you to easily create customised reports. Again, it is important to integrate with your existing systems if you want to share your asset data.

• Easy auditing procedures (asset verification) as it is necessary to keep track of ‘what is where’ within your business locations. If your solution has easy to use audit functionality you are more likely to perform spot or wall-to-wall audits on a regular basis. Keeping your asset register up to date.

• Choose an asset management software provider that offers various ways of technical support such as telephone support and online meetings/chat.

• Make sure that the software you choose has a back-end technical support team that is friendly, well-trained and who can solve your queries and problems easily.

Important Considerations When Selecting Asset Management Software

Can you access your asset data anytime and anywhere?

Cloud-hosted SaaS options are accessible on any web-enabled device. Smartphones, tablets and laptops provide you with mobility and accessibility no matter where you are. So you can keep an eye on those assets, even when they’re out of sight.

Can you configure the system to suit your processes and is it scalable?

As your business evolves, your asset management requirements will change too. Choosing an asset management solution that is easy for you to configure, and offers scalability means you can create a bespoke asset management system that evolves with the needs of your organisation.

Is there real-time reporting for complete visibility?

Need to know what’s going on and need to know at any given time? Real-time searchable asset data gives you reports at your fingertips. Create simple dashboards and automated alerts/emails to access what’s important to you and have complete visibility and control of your assets while at home or in the field.

Control asset acquisitions and the procurement process

At a glance, you should know everything about your procurement and asset purchase orders. Including a complete history and current status of all purchase orders that can be filtered by suppliers, assets, budgets or departments. This means that you can easily see what assets are on order, their cost and what has been received and what is overdue.

Deeper business intelligence

Rich data provides you with the critical insights you need to make all sorts of asset decisions. When the data is accessible wherever you are, it’s not hard to make the big calls that will optimise your assets and ensure better governance.

Choosing Asset Management Software Modules

Modular software is flexible, allowing organisations to add the business intelligence they need when they need it. Broadly speaking, modularity is the degree to which a system’s components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use.

Choosing an asset management software package that embraces modular architecture will make your implementation flexible, scalable and most importantly affordable. Your software checklist should contain only the elements below that you need for your specific business, then scale up as you see more opportunities.

1. Asset lifecycle management (asset monitoring, usage tracking)
2. Stock/parts/consumables control (inventory tracking)
3. Maintenance work order management (via maintenance app)
4. Easy asset audit processes (asset verification)
5. Preventive maintenance (schedule maintenance and inspections)
6. Incident management (help desk/service desk request tracking)
7. Purchase management (monitor and track asset from the order through to deployment and beyond)
8. Asset depreciation (finance and depreciation of assets)
9. Mobile asset management using web based solutions and mobile apps (asset tracking technology)

Reasons Why You Should Use Hardcat Asset Management Software

Better outcomes through better integration

Hardcat embraces system interoperability utilising a suite of powerful tools and techniques. Out of the box, Hardcat provides you with a powerful import and export capability that can be scheduled to meet data synchronisation requirements. Thus ensuring that only the required information is shared and the most appropriate integrators and vendors are consuming data.

Operational efficiencies

Drive efficiencies by connecting your office and field teams for faster processing and improved data integrity. Automate labour-intensive audits and data collection by utilising Hardcat’s handheld scanning solutions, combined with the latest identification and tracking technology. Achieve near-perfect accuracy and reduce the time required to undertake audits by eliminating human error and cumbersome, disconnected spreadsheets.

More control where you need it

The full knowledge, control and power of Hardcat is at hand whether you are in the office or in the field. Hardcat provides you with mobility and accessibility even when you are offline, so you can empower in-field staff to rapidly and accurately capture data, complete inspections and work orders, view reports and complete audits, wherever they are.

Make faster more informed decisions

Hardcat’s tagging and tracking solution capture critical insights on assets, so you can identify assets that are missing, in the wrong location, not being utilised, in poor condition, or not in the database. And with the data accessible anytime and anywhere, your team can improve efficiency and responsiveness in the management, repair and maintenance of critical assets.

Prevent breakdowns and maintain your business continuity

Ensure assets and equipment are operating at peak efficiency at all times by proactively scheduling inspections and maintenance activities based on operational intelligence and best practices. Hardcat can also enable intelligent maintenance through the data input of sensors that continuously monitor asset performance. With careful analysis of IoT sensor data, a technician with the right skill set can be scheduled to inspect a failing asset, before it fails.

Plan, forecast and manage your maintenance

Know everything about your asset maintenance from past, current and future maintenance schedules, to operating costs, warranty, maintenance, support, and performance history – so you prove your integrity when it matters. Hardcat’s maintenance management solution delivers rich data that provides you with the critical insights you need to forecast, make decisions and manage resources that will optimise your assets and mitigate the risk of breakdowns.

Mobile maintenance crews

Efficiently manage your maintenance crews to maximise your productivity. Hardcat allows you to set up common tasks, templates and workflows, and automatically schedule recurring work orders. Automate alerts of pending, in-progress, incomplete and missed maintenance events, with in-built escalations, so maintenance is always completed on time, every time.

Improved budget control and productivity

Match your available expenditure to your procurement schedules and trigger alerts as thresholds are met, so you never over order or go over budget again. With the automation of administrative tasks across the entire procurement solution, as well as pre-defined processes and permissions and simplified re-ordering, you can significantly improve your operational efficiency and budget control.

Flexible configuration and reporting

Your data, your way. Hardcat allows you to configure your solution to suit your industry, currency, regulatory and governance requirements and tax jurisdictions. It puts the power back in your hands to develop and design custom reports and dashboards – by configuration rather than costly custom software development. It also integrates with many popular third-party systems and is scalable to react to changes in your business. Easily configure it to cover a single office location, countrywide, or even the world.

Improved control over asset depreciation

When it comes to depreciation, the Hardcat solution provides best practice asset management without the huge configuration and cost. With an agnostic platform such as Hardcat, data can easily be imported and exported to popular enterprise systems such as SAP, Oracle and Dynamics.

Group visibility in a single system

With Hardcat you don’t need to separate non-depreciable assets, such as leased items, from assets that are depreciable in financial reporting processes. No matter whether you operate across multiple countries and currencies, Hardcat allows you to depreciate all assets for all variables in a single system, providing group visibility.

Build A Tailored Asset Management System For Your Organisation

Hardcat offers a modular architecture which means you get to choose which functionalities you want. Making your implementation both flexible and affordable. Simply choose the elements you need to fit your requirements and budget now and scale for the future.