3 Key Ideas to Consider for Better Asset Management

Published 17 February, 2020

In today’s environment, proper asset management is crucial for ensuring your organization meets its bottom line. With roughly $48.3 billion dollars spent on capital equipment in 2017, it is more important than ever to ensure that equipment is managed properly once it arrives to its final destination.

Here are three key steps to help you manage your assets better.

Build a Capital Asset Database

This step requires the most initial work but can royally pay off in the long run. Sourcing information from manufacturers and vendors can take time and prove to be frustrating. Manufacturers list equipment differently, provide documentation differently, and have different methods of communication. Putting all of this information together into a format that you can understand can really save some time down the road.

Start putting all of your information all in one place if you haven’t already done so. Build a central database or shared excel spreadsheet that houses all of the necessary information you and others in your organization might need. Make sure your equipment specifications are accurate, and are reflected on Manufacturer documentation.

A database like SpecSource houses specifications and documentation for tens of thousands of pieces of equipment in a format that planners, architects, and engineers need, and can help you better manage your assets.

Standardize Workflow

Having the same workflow is essential to running a smooth operation. This is your company’s equivalent to the military’s Standard Operating Procedures. How do you track when a piece of equipment has been installed and verified? Where do you store your quotes for different pieces of equipment? How do you communicate any differences in quoted price and purchased price?

If you are using your own system or have created your own system using a variety of different Excel sheets or the like, you need to clearly outline what proper workflow should look like. This can simply be an internal reference tool that anyone can access and read or embedded bits of text in whatever tool you are using. Regardless, you should have textual documentation that explains how and why certain workflows exist for your company. This will help you identify and improve weaknesses in certain processes and will improve operational efficiency as a whole.

You and your coworkers also need to know and use the same verbiage. Using the same verbiage will help ease communication internally and externally and will help show your clients that you are part of a streamlined machine. Ideally, you will take the time to document important terms and definitions so that any member of your organization has a reference point to fall back on in a time of need.

Standardize and document proper workflow for your organization with any software you use. With customizable software such as SpecAdvisor, you can refine your workflow over time and create processes that help you operate faster and more effectively. This starts by knowing what your proper workflow looks like, so you have a baseline to start improving from.

Standardize Communication

A lot can be said for having the same colors, logos, and feel to whatever electronic or physical publications your company has. This does one important thing – makes your clients and others you interact with view you as consistent. Consistency builds trust, and trust keeps business thriving.

Your marketing or PR department might have branding under wraps. Make sure that this translates into your operations. Your clients need to get standardized reports and excel sheets from your company. Your clients do not need or want to waste time piecing together information that is formatted based on the individual sending the information.

If you don’t have a standard way of communicating data, build one. Either make some template excel sheets and pdfs that you can use or find a service that can do that. If you use SpecAdvisor, you can completely customize pdf and excel reports using our report editor or have us do so for you, then distribute those reports as needed. Add your branding and anything else you might like to really build the look of your deliverables.

In short, you should come up with a standard way of researching, documenting, and distributing data, and write down this methodology so your processes can start improving.

We hope these tips help you in making your workflow more efficient. Should you need a planning system and/or a database of equipment specifications, reach out to us at any time.