Operational Performance and Asset Management

Operational Performance and Asset Management

Operational performance and asset management go hand in hand as any shortcomings with either discipline will lead to reduced performance and underperforming assets, with high life cycle costs. This has a negative influence on financial performance and returns on capital investment.

Generally speaking, asset management is the tracking of business resources (used to create value for the organisation), along with the monitoring of regular maintenance, so you can keep using your existing assets for longer. Activities facilitated by asset management include:

• Maintenance
• Repair
• Upgrades
• End-of-life disposition

What Is Asset Management?

Asset management is all about the preservation of a company’s assets throughout its life cycle. Essentially anything that provides value to your business and is important to the functioning of the business.

Businesses all over the world are finding themselves in difficult and unfamiliar terrain, facing resource constraints and supply chain issues. So, it makes sense to get the most out of your existing assets and parts inventory – who knows when you can get replacements?

Asset management has recently been considered one of the most important sources of competitive advantage. The relationship between asset management practices and organisational performance is an important issue, as researchers have argued that the ultimate goal of asset management is to realize the value of an organisation’s assets.

An Analysis of Asset Management Core Practices and Their Influence on Operational Performance

How Can An Asset Management System Help?

Asset management systems perform multiple functions and are a process to manage assets across an organisation. Assets can be tangible or intangible and can include people, infrastructure, software and hardware, inventory and stock, machinery, and equipment.

This system also helps in asset life cycle management (the process of optimising the profit generated by your assets throughout their life cycle) and efficient resource planning (overseeing assets at all stages from purchase to disposal). Asset data is used to make appropriate asset management decisions.

Implementing an asset management system helps organisations to improve financial performance, decision-making processes, risk management, services and results, social responsibility, as well as reputation and organisational sustainability.

Impact of ISO 55000 on organisational performance: evidence from certified UAE firms: Total Quality Management & Business Excellence: Vol 32, No 1-2

Core Themes Of Asset Management And Operational Performance

The focus has shifted from mere maintenance management, toward the total cost of ownership and optimum life cycle cost. Because ineffective and underperforming assets with high life cycle costs, have a negative influence on the financial performance and return on capital investment.

The core themes of asset management are:

• To support the achievement of business needs, asset management must integrate technical and financial decision-making processes

• Asset management requires auditable and transparent decision making

• Decision-making is fact-based, where alternative solutions are evaluated using risk-based methodologies

• Asset management requires the development of a supporting leadership style and organisational culture

How Can Organisations Save Time And Money?

Organisations save time and money by knowing exactly where their assets and spares are located, whether repairs are required, their licencing status, and end-of-life disposition of the asset, by having a top-down, bottom-up, 360-degree picture of their assets and equipment.

1. Maintain assets at the lowest cost
2. Adhere to continuous improvement
3. Opportunity to plan against financial, operational, and legal risk
4. Define lean service levels
5. Create a more efficient operation with the ability to track performance
6. The utilisation of space (buildings/facilities)
7. Total cost to run assets
8. Measure and monitor life cycle costs
9. Promote the economic stability and growth of your company

Challenges Establishing An Asset Management System

Challenges have been identified with establishing an asset management system and some of these are outlined below:

Asset Data Accuracy

A lot of companies have found their current asset data to be incomplete or out of date.

Inadequate Asset Strategy

While some companies have no strategy, what other businesses have is inadequate for compliance.

Unclear Responsibilities

Where does responsibility for assets lie since it could be in several different areas and departments?

Difficulty And Expense Of Compliance

The differential could be giant between what your current asset management system is, and what it must be, your department could have depleted resources to manage the gap.

Create Certainty And Reduce Knowledge Gaps

To assist with these challenges, businesses implement a comprehensive asset management system to prevent knowledge gaps that often exist between departments, with a centralised “single source of truth” asset register. This ensures all departments access the same up-to-date information and maintain a trail of the service history for audit verification and regulatory compliance.

Asset management software that is accessible via the web and mobile devices (with data security controls) breaks down the silos, allowing you to focus on where policies and procedures align with business objectives and asset maintenance goals.

When asset and incident data is provided to operators, maintenance teams and executives, you have a transparent decision-making process that creates trust across the organisation.

Comprehensive asset management software should:

• Increase operational efficiency, which is a goal for most organisations to maximise ROI while keeping in line with budgets.

• Easily control asset movement and monitor utilisation to optimise your resources.

• Improve accountability by maintaining transparency throughout daily operations across locations.

• Maintain ownership trails to account for daily usage. This makes it easier to investigate cases of missing equipment and asset misuse.

• Streamlined location management when multiple locations need to be supervised.

Investing in the right asset management software can effectively monitor assets at various locations, ensuring a proper channel of authorisation with the least potential for errors.

In-Depth Visibility Into Every Asset

As organisations become ever more extensive and more interconnected, they have also become reliant on technology. So it is, therefore, more critical than ever to keep track of those resources. When everyone is connected, it’s important to track exactly who has access to your asset data.

Asset management is largely a data-driven process as one of the key elements of asset management is using data to support decisions.

Such data is key to maintaining assets in a state of good repair and addressing safety issues. Simple tasks such as capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, and analysis are challenging as our ability to collect data expands. Ideally “better” data will be understandable, transparent, interoperable, automated, and visual.

Opportunities and Challenges in Asset Management

Multi-industry case studies clearly show significant reductions in running expenses by:

• Reducing the potential for unnecessary asset purchases through accurate and accessible information

• What assets already exist and their current levels of utilisation and depreciation

• Improve the utilisation of assets by tracking their usage

• Assists in the planning process by contributing up-to-date information on assets

• Helps to reduce the likelihood of fraud occurring by tracking assets

• Conducting regular audits to ensure asset data accuracy

• Ensures the maintenance requirements outlined in each asset’s warranty are tracked and complied with

Asset management software captures all of this information and provides reports that the company can utilise to enhance asset use. A well-implemented asset management software system provides your business with in-depth visibility into every asset inside its environment to help:

1. Lower maintenance expenses
2. Dispose of old assets
3. Guide new IT equipment acquisitions
4. Increase software licence usage
5. Protect against security threats
6. Make the business more audit-ready and compliant

How Can Hardcat Help?

Hardcat asset management software is jam-packed with all of the capabilities and functionality you need to help your organisation save time and money.

Hardcat software solutions are considered the best solution for overall asset management because of the mature technology and ease of use, providing an opportunity to plan against financial, operational and legal risks.

Requirement	Outcome using Hardcat
Consolidated view of all assets across your company	Better decision-making and governance
Reduce redundant purchases	Cost savings
Locate unused equipment across your site	Better utilisation
Common system to be used across the business	Save time training/ease of change management and standardisation
Ease of onboarding for new sites	A common backbone and simple user interface will improve user observance and streamline processes
Common standards for assets across the business	Provides governance and control to meet organisational asset management strategies and best practice
Increase purchasing power	Buying for the group instead of the site by site provides substantial cost savings
Clean integration into ERP System	Supplementing not substituting provides major savings

To Sum Up

Hardcat solutions encompass the identification and management of risks that arise from the utilisation and ownership of assets. Provides you with the certainty and the critical insights you need to optimise and maintain your critical assets, mitigate the risk of failure, and ensure that you have governance, compliance, health, and safety covered. Give your team what they need to quickly and accurately manage faults and service issues, with the most efficient mobile tools possible.

Also read: Enterprise asset management software continues to be essential to build a robust asset management strategy. Amidst the current business climate, investing in long term efforts rather than over-prioritising short-term goals is the smarter option.

Strategic asset management

1. Highly configurable dashboards
2. Robust and easy-to-use feature-rich mobile app
3. Workflows and processes can be customised
4. Straightforward and easy-to-follow navigation
5. Feature-rich toolset with mature technology
6. Change management and license management
7. Work orders and jobs management
8. Manage assets at multiple locations and assets moving between locations
9. The notification system is easy to set up, and it quickly notifies users of any problems
10. Inventory/stock/parts and asset management under one platform
11. Mobile apps for scanning and creating assets on the go, which is completely integrated with our web application
12. Managed I.T. assets do not have to be networked
13. On-premises or cloud-hosted options
14. Extensive reporting both pre-formatted and ad-hoc
15. Solid technical support