As an organizational leader, you are always looking to maximize efficiency while ensuring safety and optimizing profits.
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) provides businesses with the strategies needed to streamline operational processes—from day-to-day tasks to long-term strategic planning. With EAM’s range of tools, it can help you increase business success in areas such as inventory control and asset utilization.
In this blog post, we will explore essential EAM best practices that will equip your organization with the asset management knowledge needed for future growth.
What Is Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), And Why Is It Important?
Enterprise asset management (EAM) is a business process that facilitates the day-to-day operations, maintenance, and repair of physical assets across an organization and throughout the asset lifecycle.
It enables companies to take a proactive, organized approach to their fixed assets, allowing them to save time and money by optimally managing assets for their entire lifecycle — from acquisition and implementation to use, maintenance, and eventual disposal.
At its core, EAM makes intelligent decisions about when and how to manage assets best so companies can reduce downtime and ensure reliability.
By making efficient use of resources, EAM also helps minimize operating costs associated with asset performance.
Consequently, EAM provides companies with a comprehensive strategy for managing their most valuable resource: their assets.
Five Best Practices For Effective Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)
Enterprise asset management (EAM) is an integral part of keeping businesses running smoothly. When it is managed effectively, it can maximize profitability and minimize downtime. There are several important best practices businesses should employ to ensure their EAM systems are working correctly, which we’ve outlined below.
Enterprise Asset Management Best Practice 1: Implement a Maintenance Schedule
Keeping assets in top condition starts with implementing a regular maintenance schedule that aligns with the asset’s requirements and its intended purpose. This allows you to be proactive instead of reactive when it comes to fixing issues before they happen, ensuring that operations are not disrupted due to broken machinery.
Moreover, having an updated maintenance schedule will also help maintenance managers identify opportunities to improve efficiency, save energy, and make sure that assets are operating at optimal performance so there is no wasted time or neglect of needed repairs.
A regular maintenance schedule is an integral part of establishing effective enterprise asset management practices.
Enterprise Asset Management Best Practice 2: Create Asset Hierarchies
Effective enterprise asset management requires careful organization to ensure assets are located and tracked in an efficient manner.
Establishing meaningful hierarchies of assets helps with this goal by allowing assets to be organized and grouped by their similarity or other meaningful criteria. This provides a much-needed structure for larger operations, as it quickly visualizes the relationship between items in an effective way.
It also can make it easier to find specific items within larger collections, as well as to help locate where spare parts may need to be obtained.
In any enterprise asset management system, creating a set of hierarchies will prove invaluable in making tracking and locating assets in real time easier than ever before.
Enterprise Asset Management Best Practice 3: Leverage Asset Tags And Labels
Leveraging asset tags and labels when tracking enterprise assets is crucial to ensure proper asset management.
These asset labels can be used to denote important information such as usage, ownership, location, condition, or any other asset-specific details needed.
This strategy helps with immediately distinguishing between multiple assets that are of the same class or type. For example, in a warehouse setting, you could use an asset label for a QR code that stores helpful metadata about the item in question.
Apart from ease of tracking, these labels provide important data security and touchless access control benefits as well. Companies interested in improved asset tracking should consider implementing these practices to achieve greater precision and accuracy while dealing with their enterprise assets.
Enterprise Asset Management Best Practice 4: Track Fixed Asset Depreciation
Knowing exactly how much an asset is depreciating, combined with an understanding of its monthly lifecycle costs, gives businesses the insight they need to not only make smart long-term decisions regarding their assets but also to forecast what they might need in the future.
By tracking these numbers over time, businesses can gauge whether their initial investments are coming back or if those investments can be better allocated elsewhere.
Keeping track of asset depreciation and other lifecycle costs is central to smarter operations and better business.
Enterprise Asset Management Best Practice 5: Store Documentation Electronically
Our last best practice for enterprise asset management is to store all manuals, schematics, and other related documentation in an electronic form. Doing this makes it easy to access all of this information quickly and efficiently.
By not having to waste time searching through physical files and binders, businesses can easily keep track of important paperwork and get their employees up to speed with training materials with ease.
Through the technology available today, it’s easier than ever to switch over to an electronic storage system that can be easily updated when a change has occurred, or a new document needs to be created.
Every business should have a comprehensive electronic filing system that gives them fast access to surveillance data and technical documents. This will result in more efficient day-to-day operations and smooth sailing for future enterprises.
Following these best practices makes it possible to maximize value while also ensuring company assets are maintained properly.
Implement These Enterprise Asset Management Best Practices With An EAM Solution
An enterprise asset management (EAM) solution helps organizations apply best practices for keeping their assets organized, up to date, and ready for whatever comes their way through asset tracking hardware and software.
- Implementing a regular maintenance schedule is made easier by using powerful preventive maintenance calculations, schedules, and automated alerts from an EAM system.
- Asset hierarchies can be easily built within the system and leveraged for understanding how assets fit together and interact.
- With asset tags and labels tracked in the system, the accuracy of information is ensured so that the asset data in the EAM always matches what is actually onsite.
- Additionally, track fixed asset depreciation seamlessly to get a complete picture of an organization’s financials and tax requirements.
- Finally, store documentation (e.g., manuals, service reports) electronically to provide easy access whenever needed.
An EAM solution makes all of these best practices more achievable while reducing paper-based processes, which can cause time delays and inaccuracies.
How To Get Started With Enterprise Asset Management Best Practices
Implementing these five best practices for effective enterprise asset management will help you keep your assets organized, well-maintained, and under control. And the best part is that most of these practices can be easily implemented with the help of an EAM solution.
So if you’re looking to get started improving your EAM process, explore our product offerings and request a demo below. We’d be happy to show you how our EAM software can help streamline your enterprise asset management process.
Last Updated on December 12, 2022 by Radiant