Capital Planning not Limited to Big Corporations Anymore
Every organization has a finite amount of capital and needs to use it in the most efficient way possible. This is where asset management comes in. By keeping track of an organization’s assets and associated costs, asset management can help organizations make better decisions about allocating their capital.
By understanding the cost of maintaining an asset over its lifetime, asset management can also help organizations save money on maintenance and repair costs. Every penny must be accounted for and applied toward projects with the most impact.
Asset management is a comprehensive strategy for managing an organization’s physical assets, from acquisition and tracking to maintenance and disposition.
Capital + Data = Power
When it comes to capital planning and purchasing, data is power. But what happens when your business still lacks a single data source that drives business decisions?
If you think your spreadsheets are doing the trick, think again.
Excel spreadsheets, even shared versions, end up siloed, duplicated, and renamed– and you can still be looking at multiple standalone versions.
For example, important business and financial information on properties, leases, vehicles, equipment, and technology investments often find themselves in siloed spreadsheets within different departments.
When the accounting department tracks expenses but lacks ROI and total cost of ownership insight for each asset, they can’t help the purchasing department make buying decisions.
The purchasing department may have a historical list of past vendors, but they need help seeing the business impact of those purchases/investments to determine who to purchase or lease from in the future.
At the same time, your maintenance crew answers work orders but needs more info to predict when specific systems or equipment might fail.
Having an asset management strategy gives your business a single source of truth that brings all this data into one place for more educated planning and purchasing decisions.
Here’s a closer look at how asset management supports capital planning and how to implement a smart strategy.
Capital planning through visibility
Asset management is critical for improving capital planning and decision-making. By providing a complete picture of an organization’s assets, asset tracking can help identify areas where leaders can improve to increase efficiency and reduce costs. In addition, asset tracking can provide valuable insights into an organization’s future needs, helping to ensure that the right investments are made in the right areas.
An asset management system can help reduce the risk of unplanned downtime and unexpected costs by providing visibility into managing an organization’s physical assets, including planning, acquisition, deployment, maintenance, utilization, and disposition.
Capital planning for sustainability
“Asset managers are paying more attention to ESG — environmental, social and governance — concerns, according to a recent report from Northern Trust.”
The role of asset management in sustainability is to manage resources and assets so that they are used most efficiently, with minimal negative impact on people and the environment.
Capital planning by reducing costs
Asset management is a critical part of capital planning for any organization. By tracking and managing the maintenance of physical assets, asset tracking can help reduce the cost of routine maintenance and the overall cost of ownership as well as improve decision-making around replacement and acquisition.
Asset tracking systems track an asset throughout its lifecycle, from acquisition to disposal. In addition, asset tracking can provide valuable data points for assessing risk and developing long-term plans for strategic asset management.
Capital planning by automating processes
Asset Management improves capital planning by automating processes for collecting, managing, and reporting data. This means that accurate information is available at the time of decision-making, enabling organizations to make better decisions on how to spend their capital resources.
Capital planning from the cloud
The future of asset management is now cloud-based and can be integrated with various other applications. Because of this, an increasing number of businesses are increasingly choosing to move into the cloud year after year. Tracking assets from the cloud offers incredible benefits not possible with on-premise systems:
- Access data from anywhere in the world with a good internet connection available on virtually any conceivable device.
- By using the mobile devices that are already owned by the employees, they are familiar with it and save a lot of money both for services, hardware, and training.
- You can reduce the cost of services and hardware equipment and eliminate all the maintenance hassle and problems such as upgrades and obsolescence.
- You can start with low capacity, and the data storage capacity is easily scalable depending on your requirements.
- The security of your data increases as cloud services provide robust security software to protect your data.
Having your asset management processes in the cloud means that you will be able to access your data anywhere and have the ability to scale your operations as needed without a huge upfront investment. Web-based asset management software makes it easy for you to make you upgrade your requirements as your inventory items and locations increase.
You can see detailed information about every asset throughout its lifecycle, manage preventive maintenance and work orders, optimize inventory, and create customized reports to manage the metrics that matter most.
Asset management is one of the most important components of any successful business, big or small. Adopting an effective tool that would provide both efficiency and transparency is a game-changer.
Our asset tracking software sets the foundation for predictive maintenance and other advanced asset performance strategies by bringing all your critical data into one place. To learn more about capital planning and asset management, don’t miss the demo.