A well-planned asset inventory management system can save you countless hours of unplanned downtime, wasted labor, and lost productivity. Fortunately, eMaint makes it easy to implement an effective asset inventory management system and keep it running smoothly – even if you’re facing labor constraints.
In this article, we’ll talk about what asset inventory management means and what it looks like in practice. We’ll also discuss specific ways asset inventory management can transform your plant.
What Is Asset Inventory Management?
Asset inventory management combines two critical practices: asset management and inventory management. In short, asset inventory management means creating a catalog of all your organization’s assets.
But, of course, it doesn’t stop there. Your organization isn’t static, and neither is your asset inventory. That’s why a good asset inventory management system tracks both the movement and location of your assets throughout their lifecycles. Furthermore, asset inventory management also tracks asset condition and utilization.
What Is an Asset Inventory Management System?
An asset inventory management system is a combination of hardware, software, and protocols, all with the same goal: to track all your assets and their availability. A dependable asset inventory management system makes it easy for your various teams to input data and check on the locations of assets. Ideally, your asset inventory management system should be easy to customize, as no two operations have the same exact needs.
But before we get into how asset inventory management works in practice, let’s first take a minute to understand a few related terms.
What Is an Asset?
An asset is any item that helps your team carry out its work. Most of the time, the term asset means a piece of machinery, a vehicle, or a device (like a tablet or computer). But an asset is any piece of equipment a company uses to produce its products, deliver services, and keep its operations up and running.
As you can imagine, the larger your operation, the harder it is to keep track of your assets. For example, an agribusiness that runs a string of orchards and ranches must maintain a large fleet of vehicles. And keeping tabs on the location, condition, and utilization of all of those vehicles can be a major challenge.
That’s where asset inventory management comes in. Asset inventory management keeps track of all the assets a company owns so that they are available whenever and wherever they are needed.
What Is Inventory?
Inventory is a broad term. Inventory items are all the parts and materials that go into making a final product or crafting any deliverable. Intermediate products or works in progress (WIP) also count as inventory, as do unsold finished products. And, of course, all the MRO supplies that are necessary to keep your assets running smoothly are part of your inventory.
There is a great deal of overlap between asset inventory management and inventory management. Fortunately, a good CMMS like eMaint can handle both, letting you track your assets and spare parts in the same central database.
Why Is Asset Inventory Management Important?
Asset inventory management ensures that plants and facilities have up-to-date inventories of all their assets, which is the first step to building a strong asset lifecycle management system.
Asset inventory management can help your organization:
- Improve supply chain management
- Track asset utilization
- Track the movement of assets across worksites
- Improve budgeting and forecasting
- Improve scheduling
- Support proactive maintenance strategies
What Is an Example of Asset Inventory Management?
Silver Bay Seafoods is a frozen fish and seafood processor located on remote islands in Alaska that turned to eMaint for managing their assets and inventory. With the help of eMaint’s software experts, Silver Bay configured the CMMS to help them effortlessly track parts, support automatic re-ordering, and generate purchase orders.
The team quickly saw significant improvements in inventory accuracy, which resulted in increased uptime. eMaint also automated tasks like printing bar codes and producing auditing reports, further improving efficiency. The software even helps the company train new seasonal employees, which is an essential feature for Silver Bay Seafoods since they face a great deal of worker turnover.
Using the right tools can help any operation overcome labor constraints and a lack of expertise.
Using eMaint for Asset Inventory Management
A CMMS like eMaint gives you instant visibility into both asset location and status. And any data you put into the system is automatically updated across the platform, so your teams always have access to the information they need, regardless of location. This makes eMaint an excellent choice for any organization with multiple locations or remote teams.
But eMaint gives you a bigger-picture view, too. The software can help you streamline your asset inventory, tracking, and asset lifecycle management programs so that you have all the data you need right at your fingertips.
eMaint lets you see your assets’ maintenance histories, current condition monitoring data, and spare parts inventory — all on one platform. You can also use eMaint’s reporting functions to drill down and view more detailed information for any of your assets.
Having all the data you need directly at your fingertips opens the door to greater efficiency, better decision-making, and more effective forecasting. That’s why eMaint helps open up a sure path to improving productivity, lowering costs, and reducing unplanned downtime.