Owning a company entails acquiring tangible assets like machinery, tools, vehicles, equipment, stock inventory, and raw materials. These items are essential in business growth because they help you generate sales that you can use to expand your operations to multiple locations. However, if you don’t track them, you might accumulate unnecessary replacement costs and cause team conflict due to reporting errors.
Fortunately, you can prevent these situations by developing an asset-tracking system. Doing so helps you minimize expenses and improve staff productivity because your employees won’t have to look for missing assets. Aside from that, you’ll ensure that your workers will carefully handle your equipment, helping you adopt accountability.
This feature provides you with five effective practices for
improving asset tracking. Keep on reading to learn more.
1.Consider The Full Asset Life Cycle
The complete asset life cycle includes asset planning, acquisition, utilization, maintenance, and renewal or disposal. This process allows you to assess the useful life of your commercial assets, helping you measure how long you can expect them to be beneficial to your organization. As a result, you’ll be able to free up resources, leverage the total productivity of your assets, and extend their lifespan.
When managing asset life cycles, you have to use
a good system that’ll allow you to organize portfolios and monitor reports on various assets across teams. This technology has advanced features like maintenance scheduling, lifecycle management, real-time monitoring, and thorough reporting. Once you invest in this software, you’ll have seamless asset management task distribution and receive the latest reports about their progress, helping you save time and effort.
2.Ensure Asset Register Accuracy
When you acquire new assets in your warehouse or commercial space, you need to input these items into your asset register. This comprehensive list will allow you to receive updates about your possessions’ current value, location, price, and procurement date. If you maintain an accurate asset register, you will be able to gain total transparency of your asset details and ensure that you will remain compliant with regulatory standards.
To ensure the accuracy of your asset register, you must avoid using a spreadsheet file because it’s vulnerable to manual input errors that will affect your asset tracking initiative. Instead, you should invest in fixed asset management software that has a mobile-friendly interface, so you have smoother equipment inspections. Instead of manually counting warehouse inventory and office equipment, you can easily integrate all your records into this platform and share the document with your team.
3.Assign Unique Tracking Numbers
Tracking codes play a vital role in
successful company assets tracking because you’ll be able to assign a customized reference to each asset, so you won’t have to get rid of manual data input. These tags may include a barcode, a self-adhesive label, or a unique serial number using scanning technology like global positioning system (GPS) and radio frequency identification (RFID). You can attach these tags to assets like office equipment, computer hardware, hydraulic power units, appliances, vehicles, and furniture.
When assigning tracking numbers, you must identify the asset tag type and category required. For instance, you should assess if the items will be vulnerable to harsh climate conditions or if the high-value assets can be subject to tampering and theft. Aside from that, you should also determine whether the equipment will be exposed to harsh chemicals like solid cleaning solutions.
4.Install Advanced Security Systems
As you attach unique tracking numbers to your assets, you still have to secure them so you can protect them from theft. In case an attack occurs, you’ll have clear evidence of the incident to make the criminal accountable for paying for damages and lost office equipment. Besides that, you’ll be able to alert internal security personnel once an intruder enters your business premises so they can take necessary actions to prevent dangerous acts.
When monitoring your assets, you must install advanced security systems to reduce equipment losses or monitor how your employees use your office appliances. These technologies may include high-resolution video surveillance cameras, intrusion detectors, and an access-controlling system. When choosing these automation tools, you need to ensure the credibility of the manufacturers by checking online reviews.
5. Develop Company-Wide Asset Management Training
Your employees are the ones who’ll primarily use your commercial assets. Therefore, you need to provide them with the skills they need as they handle equipment to prevent them from misusing it. Aside from that, they’ll remember the importance of returning and locking up assets in their respective storage facilities to avoid damage and loss.
When training your employees for
corporate-wide asset monitoring, you must collect insights about who’s responsible for handling specific equipment. Next, you must create modules discussing the necessary topics about proper asset storage and how to read correctly read labels. Then, you have to measure the program’s effectiveness by reviewing your staff’s knowledge and using these insights to make necessary changes.
Key Takeaway
As a business owner, you should prioritize the safety of your commercial possessions to avoid frequently losing and replacing items. Thus, you should consider following these five practices to improve your organization’s asset tracking. Once you do so, you can prevent asset theft, loss, and damage, ensuring your employees’ productivity and business processes are going.
