What is Enterprise Asset Management? And Why Do You Need It

For every business, assets play a pivotal role in creating and enhancing the value of the business, which is inclusive of plant, property, and equipment. They form the largest chunk of any manufacturing company’s balance sheet. Therefore, it is essential to meticulously manage your assets during their lifecycle by recording and valuing them accurately and having a proper maintenance schedule for every asset.

However, it may be convoluted to keep a track of every asset manually and the probability of committing errors would be quite high. A slight error or incompliance can lead to a huge loss. Furthermore, inefficient management of assets can lead to supply shortages, unplanned downtime, suboptimal asset management, non-compliance with regulatory bodies, asset thefts, and others.

Asset Management Software: A Robust Solution for Managing Assets Efficiently

With the technology progressing at a phenomenal pace, it’s time for businesses to put a full stop to all such complications and inefficacies. Ramco’s Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) software is an all-inclusive and future-proof solution for managing assets efficiently.

EAM software is different from ERP software, which includes multiple software systems for handling different tasks in a single platform. Though a few ERP softwares also have an asset management module, when it comes to basic and essential details of asset management, enterprise asset management is more robust as compared to ERP software. EAM solutions could well be integrated with existing ERPs.

An enterprise asset management software, which is inclusive of the asset tracking system, helps in maintaining the physical assets of a company throughout its life cycle. The entire company can have access to EAM and contribute to enhancing and maximizing asset performance during their lifecycle, earning a better return on investment, improving efficiency, reducing downtime, keeping workplaces safe, and much more.

Enterprise asset management software includes functionality for planning, scheduling, and managing work; tracking maintenance history; creating work orders; ordering equipment and replacement parts, tracking them; tracking equipment components and assemblies, etc.

While EAM software is a useful tool for most organizations. It supports asset maintenance across industries and accommodates the maintenance needs of various stakeholders such as manufacturers, 3^rd party service providers, authorized service providers and captive maintenance departments. 

5 Reasons You Should Deploy Enterprise Asset Management Software

1. Maximizing Efficiency by Analyzing the Asset Utilization
   An asset management software provides checks and balances, helping in the identification of areas of efficiency. Additionally, it helps you in finding a solution for efficient equipment utilization and bringing down the cost of replacing your equipment frequently. However, if you manage or maintain your assets inappropriately, you might have to replace your equipment oftentimes.

2. Scheduling and Tracking Asset Maintenance
   Maintaining assets is essential for enhancing the procedure’s efficiency. With enterprise asset management software, you just need to set a reminder for the regular maintenance of your assets. However, if your organization is devoid of an EAM, your routine asset maintenance tasks might not take place on time, leading to inefficient functioning or reduced lifecycle of the asset. Therefore, scheduling maintenance ensures the timely service of the assets. A good EAM not just enables effective scheduling, but also lets you effectively allocate manpower, tools and spares.

3. Streamlining Daily and Audit Operations
   Auditing is essential for having the details related to your assets handy and calculating taxes. Without efficient asset tracking software in place, these audit processes might take up a lot of time and be exhausting, and still not give the correct asset evaluation. The asset management software allows you to schedule the audit timeframe and receive the status update on the process, making the process simpler, easier, and error-free. In more advanced asset management modules such as Ramco EAM, tracking failures become slick with electronic signatures and time stamps. With the asset tracking software, you can even improve daily operations and activities by removing the unnecessary steps, thus, streamlining the daily operations.

4. Extending the Life of Assets
   When does an organization discern the need of adding new assets? It is when they are expanding their operations, adding a new product line, and looking forward to enhancing their revenues, right? Nonetheless, if the assets do not function as they are expected to, your investment might go down the drain. Usually, this happens when you are unable to keep up with the maintenance schedule of assets or they are not repaired on time, etc., which ultimately leads to a reduced life cycle of the assets.
   With the asset tracking software, you can keep up with the repair and maintenance schedule and proper functioning of assets, extending the life cycle of assets, reducing downtime, and saving on expenses.

5. Analytics and Reporting
   By deploying asset management software, you can easily track your maintenance operations. As EAM is combined with a wide variety of reports, you can gain access to operational insights such as real-time updates on the activities of the maintenance department, efficient asset performance management, tracking different KPIs and metrics, clear trail for tracking costs associated with different aspects of asset management and so on.

Also Read: Why Should Asset Management Go Digital?

How to Choose the Right EAM Solution for Your Business?

With a wide variety of asset management solutions available, it might get inundating for you to decide the best solution for your business. However, it is best to choose an all-inclusive asset management software that gives you the power of optimization, a customized dashboard with real-time analytics and reporting, 360-degree visibility, and other benefits. It is important to choose an advanced, future-ready, and best-in-class EAM solution so that it doesn’t become obsolete in a short span of time and supports market dynamics and the changing demands of your organization.