Many companies begin with an idea. Next, they’ll gather inventory, equipment, technology, and more to improve operations. These are all investments your business wants to leverage as much as it should.
You can track and manage your company’s assets to keep explicit knowledge about them. You can read further below to learn about asset tracking, its purposes, and its benefits.
What Is Asset Tracking?
Asset tracking happens whenever a business manages and tracks physical assets. It often involves software and hardware solutions for reporting the physical assets’ status. Some examples of technologies that can help you in tracking are asset tags, barcode scanners, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and radio-frequency identification (RFID)
Asset tracking and management also uniquely focus on the physical objects’ location. However, the solutions may also track an asset’s type, name, engine hours, usage, maintenance schedule, or other data.
Purposes Of Asset Tracking
Knowing which assets to track allows your business to achieve greater supply chain and logistics efficiencies, inventory management, yard management, or manufacturing. You can also measure potential expenses and calculate profit because of it.
Yet, the purpose of asset tracking can also include the following:
- Retail customer experience
- Handling check-in and checkout for business equipment
- Safety applications, including perimeter breach detection for hazardous substances or dangerous objects.
- Location data for predictive maintenance and repairs
- Condition adherence for perishable goods
You can consider these reasons for tracking your assets if you’re deciding whether to conduct this tracking in the first place.
Business Benefits Of Asset Tracking
Besides knowing the purpose of tracking assets, learning its benefits is equally essential. Read on to learn what some of those benefits are.
1. It Reduces Costs
One benefit of tracking your business’s physical assets is reducing costs. For one, you can avoid hiring staff to track manually, reducing the administrative costs of your business. You can also prevent manual mistakes that can lead to asset loss.
Besides reducing administrative costs, you can lower the cost of maintenance and repair. There is asset tracking software that can track key maintenance dates. You can quickly set alerts to notify your team of future service appointments, warranty ends, and more.
Because asset tracking software helps with proper maintenance, you can have more reliable and durable equipment, machinery, and technology, leading to a lesser need for maintenance in the first place. It reduces the money needed to keep your physical assets working as they should be.
2. It Centrally Consolidates All Assets Data
Businesses that use heavy machinery and equipment often have bought such physical assets from various suppliers at differing periods in their company’s lifecycle. They have different equipment models, makes, and manufacturers. While you can see a telematics system in some of these pieces of equipment from manufacturers, equipment managers, and operators can find it hard to efficiently depend on or fully use this disparate data from various sources.
For the abovementioned issue, modern asset tracking software can help. This software mixes with the systems already installed and centrally consolidates that data in a single location. Because of this streamlined approach, equipment managers can quickly obtain information about their assets’ status and background from a single dashboard on their mobile devices or computer.
3. It Allows For Prompter Tax Returns Preparations
As assets contain a value, businesses must track them properly to have ideal tax records. Assets, such as furniture, machines, and technology, annually depreciate a little. Thus, you must have records of the money you spent buying and maintaining them. You must also have a document if there are changes in their status as time goes on. For this, you can use inventory software to track these pieces of information.
Inventory software can upload photos and receipts, assign value, input the assets’ condition, and more. You can even generate a tag or folder for all depreciating assets, then create a report about only these physical assets that you can send to your accountant.
4. It Optimizes Production
You can also optimize your business’s production with asset tracking. Knowing the assets’ location and how your company uses them can boost production procedures. Below are some ways asset tracking helps with production optimization:
- Work-In-Progress (WIP) Limits: These are essential in lowering cycle times. For this matter, asset tracking helps in maintaining these limits. For one, your business may recognize bottlenecks and business areas in which production is becoming slow. Your business can then use this data to adjust production procedures to boost efficiency and lower cycle time.
- Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE): It’s the ideal standard for assessing manufacturing productivity. With asset tracking, you can improve three vital OEE factors: performance, availability, and quality.
The present marketplace is competitive. Thus, businesses are searching for solutions to optimize production and improve efficiency. But with asset tracking, nearly all aspects of optimizing production, from limiting WIP to boosting OEE, can be achieved. Tracking the assets’ location and condition lets you determine possible issues before they can affect your business.
5. It Saves Time
Using spreadsheets often leads to sacrificing auditing speed or accuracy. But today’s asset-tracking solutions are accurate and quick. For one, all your assets have their profile. Then, every data you input into each profile gets extracted into an editable and customizable reports system. Here, you can manage data and bulk edit, reducing time spent tracking assets. One specific way asset tracking helps you save time is that you can use tags.
Asset tags are Quick Response (QR) codes or barcodes that you stick to your physical assets. After attaching these technologies, you can obtain your assets’ profiles by scanning their tags. Ultimately, the benefit of asset tracking in saving time is essential to consider.
Final Thoughts
There are many reasons why your company must track its physical assets. Some of those reasons include improving productivity, measuring expenses, and calculating profits. If you decide whether to track your assets, this article tackles some benefits you can consider for your business. Start tracking your assets now to reap these benefits.
