According to PwC mismanaged assets are costing business around the world $17 billion a year in losses, unnecessary maintenance and non-compliance. How can you compile and manage an asset register that increases visibility and control over vital equipment without becoming a nightmare to maintain?
An asset register is a dynamic list of the assets and equipment that your business currently owns. The purpose of an asset register is to track the service history, value, location and condition of this equipment to keep you in control of costs and minimise risk of their loss or failure. An asset register should support you in making critical business decisions around maintenance, compliance and Capex.
An asset register can be maintained in paper form, spreadsheet or as part of dedicated asset management software.
Do you know where all your fixed assets are? Do you know what condition they’re in and how much they’re costing you to maintain? Do they pose a H&S risk to users? Do you know when they will likely need to be replaced? This data has often been hard for companies to maintain.
As businesses reopen post-Covid there are significant new pressures on businesses to keep a better track of their assets and understand any risks associated with them as well as the ongoing costs they represent.
Recording critical details of all your significant assets in one accessible digital location means you can manage and audit them more efficiently. It must be easy to use the asset register to keep track of costs, maintenance trends and project the lifespan of critical assets to control future spending.
Many companies still use spreadsheets to record and maintain the details of their companies assets. But keeping details of the movement and maintenance of assets up to date in Excel, as well as managing complex formulas for depreciation can prove a nightmare.
Multiple workers maintaining records via a shared drive and a lack of automation can result in records being overwritten or just not being kept at all.
But many software packages specifically designed as asset registers can be equally cumbersome and difficult to maintain. Many packages are not built around mobile use, don’t offer visualisations of asset locations, are hard to update with fresh location details when they change, and offer poor auditing solutions. Workflows around maintenance and servicing can be equally hard to set up and change, so asset data is not kept up to date and the information on the register risks becoming obsolete.
At the high end of these software offerings complex geo-tracking solutions can add unnecessary cost and complexity to the way you work. They can make the set-up and ongoing maintenance of the asset management solution itself more of a burden.
They should help you capture details of your assets and add them to your register, through simple data uploads (as spreadsheets) or in real time via a mobile device.
The right asset register software (working as part of a CAFM system) should let you ‘walk the floor’ with your mobile phone or tablet, recording the details of your assets as you go. These tools need to help you compile your register quickly and intuitively:
As you build a record of assets in this way and generate QR codes for them, you’ll have the tools to audit more quickly and effectively in the future by simply scanning their labels. Scanning assets will give the engineer confidence that they are in the correct work order, servicing the right equipment and generally speed up the entire user experience.
The system should trigger the users for asset data management at the right time in the workflow. The engineer and FM mobile user experience should lend itself to easy and seamless asset handling.
It should be simple and intuitive for engineers and facilities managers to record all of the activities associated with your assets.
Ultimately, if you are curating an accurate register of assets with the ability to record and update
what you have spent on them, their current status, condition, location and service history - you should have the data you need to make the right business decisions.
But not every asset register will be able to turn this data into the kind of bespoke reports your business and teams need to visualise the trends, risks and expenditure that should be driving your strategy.
A good set of asset management tools will draw on the data in the asset register to compile reports and charts that will give you, at a glance, visuals surrounding:
As well as the powerful strategic tools that can help
A good asset register should lie at the heart of your asset management strategy. It is the definitive and dynamic list of all the significant assets in your possession. It should be easy to set up and keep updated - and the data within it should be easily accessible and constantly feeding your strategic decision making.