What is Asset Management?
Asset management is an operational procedure that can include several activities, such as planning, acquiring, operating, maintaining, upgrading, and disposing of a company’s assets. The primary goal of asset management is to maximize the value and performance of assets throughout their lifecycle while minimizing associated risks and costs.
An asset management system helps businesses in the asset management process, helping them keep track of all their tangible and non-tangible assets. This includes personnel, buildings, IT applications, hardware and networking assets, inventory, monetary assets, and anything else that is vital for the business’s day-to-day operations.
Key Components of an Asset Management System
Asset Management Systems consist of several key components, each playing a critical role in facilitating effective asset management. These include:
Strategy & Planning
Any asset management strategy starts with the meticulous identification and planning of assets. This includes taking an inventory of the organization’s existing assets and identifying the need for upgrade, replacement, or addition of new assets. It also focuses on the selection of the most suitable assets to meet organizational objectives within a defined budget.
Asset-related Decision Making
Asset management is all about the frameworks and policies that define how an organization can install, use, and maintain its assets to ensure that they perform at optimal levels at all times.
This involves developing tactical asset management plans to track processes, asset status, and the condition of assets in real-time.
Lifecycle Delivery
An asset lifecycle defines the timeline or period in which a particular asset can perform optimally. To improve the longevity of any asset, asset managers have to define protocols and standards that govern day-to-day aspects of the asset usage.
This includes asset maintenance, usage, resource management, operational procedures, and other processes that can help ensure the correct usage of an asset and improve its reliability over time.
Asset Tracking
Once an asset is introduced into the organization, it needs to be tracked and maintained efficiently to ensure it works as expected. To do this, organizations need to implement processes that can allow for collecting appropriate data, analyzing this for any risks or threats, and taking preventive actions or maintenance-related activities to ensure these risks are taken care of.
People & Resources
In most organizations, assets include the machinery, equipment, or applications used for day-to-day activities and the people involved in this process. To ensure optimal asset performance, organizations must enforce a company culture that understands the need for asset management and ensures that each team member is aligned toward a common goal.
Risks & Reviews
The most challenging asset management component is assessing and correctly identifying inherent risks in the organization’s system. This includes the frameworks and protocols that can help organizations manage their assets better, improve the life of an asset, and define correct usage to avoid any incidents or accidents.
To ensure that the organization manages risks and can act proactively in case of any incidents. This includes preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance, and asset refurbishment or replacement when necessary.
What does an Asset Management Software do?
Asset Management Systems typically offer a range of features that help automate and streamline the process of managing an organization’s entire IT and non-IT assets. This includes:
Asset Tracking: This allows organizations to track the location and movement of assets in real-time using technologies such as barcode scanning, RFID, or GPS.
Maintenance Management: Enabling organizations to schedule and track maintenance activities for their assets, including preventive maintenance, inspections, and repairs.
Depreciation and Financial Management: Allowing organizations to track asset depreciation and manage financial aspects such as asset valuation, budgeting, and forecasting.
Reporting and Analytics: The ability to generate customizable reports and gain further analytics on asset data that can be used for data-driven decision-making on asset performance, utilization, and inventory.
Keep Track of Your IT Assets with Motadata
The ideal asset management software helps you get a unified view of all your IT assets, helping you identify usage, track incidents or reports, and make better decisions on equipment used by your organization. With Motadata’s IT Asset Management Solution, you can:
- Track and maintain all your IT and Non-IT assets
- Manage and visualize asset dependencies
- Create reports and track asset usage in real-time
- Capture incidents and relate them to each asset for deeper analysis and troubleshooting problems
- Make data-driven purchase decisions by tracking and maintaining all your assets with alerts on expiry, upgrade, and incident/request
- Track utilization set alerts on changes, and get usage reports to control expenditure and avoid penalties