Are you aware of the location and working condition of all your physical assets? Tracking your assets is essential for your company’s profitability and growth. From the purchase of the asset to its disposal, you should keep a track of the asset to know when you need to repair or replace it. This helps you make informed decisions about your physical inventory.
Asset tracking is the method used to track physical assets to know the location, status, and maintenance schedule of the assets. You can track your organization’s assets real-time through barcode labels, GPS or RFID tags, handheld barcode scanners, and asset management software. Asset tracking helps in maximizing asset’s efficiency and minimizing the loss.
Government agencies, corporations, and other large businesses track fixed assets such as cars, chairs, IT equipment and others using automated data collection systems. According to the 2005 Clause 49 of the Listing Agreement, all publicly held companies are required to track their fixed assets.
Organizations can use data collection software to streamline the task of compiling the list of fixed assets. On the other hand, enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses can use asset tracking software to capture inventory. Mobile devices can be used to scan barcode labels to get the data required. By using an asset tracker, the location and status of an asset can be confirmed to nearly 100 percent accuracy.
What Is Asset Tracking Software?
Asset tracking software helps in tracking movement of assets- IT equipment, devices or software, within an organization. It scans the entire assets to give a quantitative record and enable physical monitoring of your assets. Through the use of asset tracking software, organizations can schedule maintenance or preventive maintenance.
There are various reasons why enterprises should use asset tracking software
- Enables Asset Recovery and GPS Positioning: When your organization is handling hundreds or thousands of assets, if one gets detached from a big batch, tracing it can be quite problematic. You can spend significant manpower and lose productive time looking for the asset. Even worse, your business may experience delayed productions, increased costs and a flurry of complaining customers.
You can avoid all the aforementioned troubles by using an asset tracking software. The software can help you to know where a particular asset is at any time and its exact GPS location.
- Improve Customer Service: Customers expect a positive return on investment when they sign a contract to do business with you. Among the things they expect is information about the location of their assets in real-time.
Asset tracking software allows you to keep tabs on your customers’ assets all the time. You can also track the efficiency in which the items are moving through your internal processes and uncover opportunities for improving production.
- Real Time Asset Management: By using a tracking software, you will have a picture of your business assets. You can track items as they arrive or are moved to particular locations in real-time.
Accurate asset tracking is critical for efficient data management. Thanks to this feature, you can spot duplicate records and remove them from the system to avoid confusion. For example, you can assign assets a unique identification number to prevent your data from being compromised for example, when two or more assets share the same serial number.
- Increase Productivity and Reduce Labor Waste: An asset tracking application can help you keep track of how many different items are passing through your departments. As a result, you can calculate an asset’s lifecycle. If your assets are tagged with RFID tags, they can be scanned automatically as they move through different stages of the process, hence eliminating the need of having people manually scanning logging their movements.
Using an asset tracker will free your employees from menial tasks and leave them to focus on other areas of your business that contribute time to your bottom-line.
- Avoid Unnecessary Repair and Maintenance Costs: It is crucial to track the life cycle of assets used in projects that take months or years to complete. When you have essential information about an item, for example, when it was bought, how often it’s used, and how regularly it is maintained, you can plan effectively for its replacement. Unproductive items can inhibit your operational efficiency and lead to unnecessary costs.
You can use asset tracking software to monitor and anticipate devaluation of items, and hence replace them on time.
- Allows Maintenance Tracking: Maintaining your assets is crucial for the efficiency of various processes. With advanced asset tracking software, you can set repeat alerts for the regular maintenance of the equipment used in your business. For example, you can set alerts based on your knowledge about an asset’s previous usage or condition.
Some asset tracking applications can even be integrated with ticketing software to help you know the person in charge of carrying out maintenance, expected completion date, and so on.
- Helps You Conduct Asset Audits and Set Stock Thresholds: Asset audits, whether done internally or externally, put a lot of strain on the business. However, the audits are important as they enable a business to identify potential ghost licenses and assets. Your business may be incurring costs for ghost assets in the form of taxes and maintenance fees.
An asset tracker can help you perform audits to increase the visibility of your assets and reduce compliance risks. The software will give you accurate data that you can use to make informed decisions.
- Streamline Maintenance Schedules: Many times, companies fall behind in maintenance management because they use manual methods to track their schedules. If some of the assets you use require ongoing or periodic maintenance, asset tracking software will give you a lifeline.
An asset management software can alert relevant employees about scheduled maintenance to ensure there are no delays.
- Ensure Regulatory Compliance Many small and medium-sized enterprises are serving in industries that are heavily regulated. These firms require to efficiently capture and report data that prove their compliance with regulatory requirements.
Asset tracking can help your organization comply with regulatory requirements such as equipment maintenance, calibration, and testing. Your reporting requirements can be completely streamlined by using an advanced asset tracking software. For example, you can get detailed compliance reports in minutes. These reports would have taken months if the same data was compiled manually.
- 10. Ensure Accuracy and Peace of Mind Lastly, using an asset tracking software gives you peace of mind that your business has achieved maximum accuracy in asset tracking. Proper tracking will allow your organization to consistently pass internal and external audits.
Using asset tracking software can help your company to scale successfully. Since the tracking application is automated, everyone in the company can track assets in real-time and provide customers, auditors, and vendors with the required data in a customized format.
Businesses can achieve effective asset tracking and inventory control through staffing and barcode solutions. These solutions help to manage assets better and augment your company’s bottom-line.
Amit Prasad is the founder and managing director of SatNav Technologies and has business interests in a wide range of IT products. SatNav Technologies is an IT products company focusing on cloud based map data products and a pioneer in GPS, FMS & LBS Technologies. The product suite includes SatTracx in-the-field location based solutions and A-mantra in-the-office facilities management solutions. QuickFMS from a-mantra is a cloud based facility management system which enhances organization’s efficiency.