Physical Asset Management

Physical asset management helps businesses maximise asset efficiency while lowering the cost of lost or underutilised equipment and providing for better life cycle management, maintenance response and workflow planning.

What is physical asset management? The management of fixed or non-current assets such as equipment and plant. Asset management presents a systematic approach to the management of these assets from concept to disposal. However, historically, asset management has not been seen as a specific professional activity, but now perceptions are changing.

Physical Asset Management; Nicholas A. J. Hastings

Access to clean asset data, departmental information sharing and asset management strategies that are integrated, implemented and aligned with your business goals, has the potential to yield long-term structural profitability, leading to a competitive advantage.

Also read: Four Primary Risks to Effective Asset Management

What Is The Greatest Challenge In Physical Asset Management?

Modern-day businesses have shifted to an environment in which employees can collaborate even when they aren’t in the same city, with much less room. That means they need asset management software that is just as technology-minded as they are. The most important qualification for any physical asset management solution is that it’s intuitively easy to learn, and accessible anytime, anywhere.

As businesses become more interconnected, it is essential to keep track of resources, and more importantly, to track exactly who has access to your physical assets and data. If your asset management software does not have an online or mobile component, and you can only access asset data on a specific computer or internal network, it’s not going to be an ideal solution for a busy business with multiple locations.

Also read: Mobile work orders for maintenance

Tips To Increase Efficiency In Physical Asset Management

1. Empower Individuals And Departments

When asset data is provided to operators, maintenance teams and executives, you have a transparent decision-making process that creates trust and certainty across the organisation. Prevent knowledge gaps that often exist between departments and reduce lost asset information between workers, remote teams, and management with a single source of truth asset management solution.

2. Operational Safety

The availability, reliability, profitability, and operational safety of assets and equipment are essential to an organisation’s success. Tracking your assets and equipment location and auditing assets regularly, as well as maintenance requirements addresses the life cycle management of an organisation’s physical assets to help maximise value.

3. Asset Management Plan

Plan the activities, resources and timescales required for your assets, to achieve the organisation’s asset management objectives. Your asset management plan should cover the operations, maintenance, decommissioning/disposal and replacement of plant, equipment, buildings/facilities, and other high-value assets.

Make sure your asset management plan spans departments, locations, facilities, business units, and regions. Providing a holistic view that considers the organisation-wide impact of asset management and how it affects operations, personnel productivity, and lifecycle costs.

4. Goals for Managing Assets

1. Reduce asset failures
2. Improve utilisation and performance
3. Reduce capital costs and operating costs
4. Extend the life of your assets
5. Improve return on asset investment
6. Know where your assets are located – with date, timestamp, and GPS coordinates
7. Identify which items have been sitting idle in a specific location
8. Save time spent searching for available assets and equipment
9. Reduce the number of lost assets and avoid replacement costs
10. Minimise paperwork and improve efficiencies
11. Hold people accountable for assets in their possession, as they move along the workflow
12. Know when assets are due for scheduled maintenance and make plans well in advance
13. Prove adherence to worker safety, health, and environmental regulations

5. Role-Based Security

Having powerful role-based security enables contractors and personnel to leverage a single sign-on database. All organisations want their assets and systems to be secure, but they also want to avoid cumbersome security processes that stand in the way of people doing their jobs.

It is possible to have it both ways with software solutions that offer security capabilities to control what someone sees on the screen i.e., what content can be viewed, selected and created. Security should be based on the role of individuals within your organisation.

The Importance Of Using Asset Management Software

Asset management software is evaluated and procured by asset-intensive businesses to satisfy physical asset support requirements. These software products help with the whole asset life cycle, from acquisition through disposal, as well as all phases in between.

Investing in asset management software allows you to easily tag and manage your assets, tools and equipment, as well as service work orders, while on the go. Whilst including all relevant people on your asset management journey creates trust, attachment, loyalty, and empowerment.

Wherever you are up to in your asset management journey take a step back and look at your core values and goals such as:

• Risk mitigation; alignment to match your assets
• Being flexible; doing it the same way as you always have done is not the optimum way to do asset management
• Innovations; technology and big data are all within reach and able to build value for your organisation
• Have clear goals for everyone in the asset management space

Physical asset management is about coping with risks over the life cycle of assets and equipment, so an asset management solution is significant to today’s businesses. Choose software that is both powerful, straightforward to use and customisable, as no two companies are the same.

Out of the box, your solution should allow for:

• Tracking and monitoring of any type of asset in your business in one central location
• Role-based security
• Access to asset data in a secure way from any location, especially looking for a mobile component
• Identifying, managing and minimise risk to your assets
• Whole asset lifecycle reporting
• Access to asset data anywhere, anytime
• Identification of ghost assets that can be removed from the system
• Planning/scheduling maintenance activities so there are no service disruptions
• Accurate, deep-dive reports that do not take hours to create
• Wall-to-wall and spot audits that do not take excessive days to complete

Hardcat Solutions

We offer a complete asset management system to help you tag, track, audit, maintain and optimise your assets, fleet, tools and equipment, property and evidence in a way that gives you complete control. We know that certainty matters. That’s why our asset management software and enterprise asset management solutions provide full and instant visibility, so you’re never in any doubt.

Hardcat solutions are:

1. Extremely rich in features and functionalities
2. Highly configurable
3. Provide integration with any external systems
4. Capabilities for labour, parts, and inventory management
5. Track asset data, including attributes and repair history
6. Advanced management capabilities, work order flow and escalation functions
7. User access: critical in knowing how and where users are accessing asset data
8. Auditability: mandatory for asset management to be both auditable and traceable
9. Ease of use: increasing speed of business processes and information extraction
10. Flexibility: business processes evolve so your Hardcat solutions will adapt as well

Hardcat solutions create certainty, reduce knowledge gaps and allow for secure access to your important asset data wherever you are.