Just because you don’t generate billions of dollars in revenue doesn’t mean you qualify as a business that can do without asset management. There seems to be an illusion that asset management is limited to large-scale enterprises. In actuality, SMBs have several of their own assets to track, manage, and maintain.
Despite a growing awareness of the need for efficient asset management, many small and medium-sized companies haven’t allocated resources towards it. Only a few have a proper system in place to monitor physical assets, and the rest continue to cling to their ink on paper, never-ending Excel spreadsheets, and other old-school tactics when managing fixed assets.
Here’s the kicker – it’s a great risk to let your business run without prioritizing asset management. A proper strategy ensures that you use assets to their full capacity and that you have backups for an asset that’s nearing the end of its cycle. The right tactics can also save you money by making certain that the need of assets are met with available resources, instead of making new investments.
With that acknowledged, here are some effective asset management tips that will help you extend the life of your assets.
IMAGE: PEXELS
Schedule Preventive Maintenance
Organizations of all sizes, including SMBs, can integrate systems that support preventive maintenance of business assets. For instance, most work order management (WOM) software options offer propriety reporting that shows what needs to be done, what’s been done already, and how to best schedule preventive maintenance. With regularly scheduled preventive maintenance, you can prevent costly emergency maintenance and increase the longevity of your assets.
Practice Asset Tracking
Large-scale organizations once managed assets as a small- or medium-sized company. [pullquote]Practicing asset tracking from the early days enables businesses to scale successfully.[/pullquote] This can be done by assigning a unique identification number to each asset (not the serial number) so that no two assets share the same number. Use asset tags and barcode labels to tag them as early as possible; this is a far simpler approach than realizing that you need asset tracking after you start growing. In other words, the fewer assets in your company’s possession when you first implement an asset tracking solution, the lesser your asset tracking investment will be.
Spread The Word
A lot of businesses take the wrong approach by educating only the IT department about asset management. A better course of action would be to educate every department. Virtually everyone in the organization uses some form of assets; companies that have assets out in the wild risk them being mishandled by personnel who don’t know how best to use them. An organization-wide policy for asset usage with annual compliance through proper signing should be the first step towards a comprehensive asset management solution.
Develop & Empower A Responsible Team
You can’t do everything yourself. SMBs can try, but depending on your organization’s size you may not be as successful as with a team. Spreading out the workload ensures that your personnel continue to specialize in their respective departments, while a team leader can be assigned to educate different staffers. For instance, the SAM team leader can demonstrate software works and its impact on the business.
Asset management may sound like a scary burden to SMBs, but it’s a worthwhile investment in the long run. By implementing these tips, you’ll be able to benefit from a streamlined asset management operation.
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4 Simple Yet Effective Asset Management Tips For SMBs
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