4 challenges and opportunities in modern enterprise asset management
These days, many companies are looking to invest in new and ground-breaking technologies to radically transform and improve their internal processes. Despite the digital waves washing across enterprise shores, companies still need to do more in order to govern their data so they can gain value from it. Customer data needs to breach its data silos to transform itself into customer insight. Product data needs to escape spreadsheet management and join harmonised business processes to become timely, personalised customer offerings. The management of data that concerns physical assets has also joined the ranks of key data that needs to evolve in how it is managed, in order to support digital transformation.
In this blog post, let’s explore some of the most common asset management challenges and opportunities of today’s digital landscape. But first, what is an asset?
An enterprise asset is a subject ‘owned’ by a company. Assets can be physical – tangible – or non-physical – intangible. Physical assets include, for instance: transportation, IT, technical and manufacturing equipment, buildings, infrastructure, network, and smart devices. Non-physical assets can include intellectual property (IP), capital, software, and/or digital assets.
In many organisations, the asset infrastructure is highly complex as assets are spread throughout locations, departments and databases which is making it difficult to achieve a complete view. This causes a lack of visibility, which prevents organisations from being able to readily answer questions like: “What is the current condition of our assets that are supporting this business process? Who is using them? Where are they located?”
However, without that asset transparency, critical information such as asset delivery, storage, forecasting and stock levels can all be easily missed, resulting in delayed workflows, higher costs, unsatisfied customers and missing or misplaced goods.
As a result, large manufacturing and service industries are paying careful attention to their asset management, as it supports the planned and proactive maintenance functions and reduces the need to carry excess inventory and replacement equipment. For other industries, the ability to locate assets and know their condition can drive cost savings. For example, in healthcare where hospital equipment is often mobile, being unable to locate it can lead to unnecessary rental or procurement costs. Capital-intensive industries rely on asset management to support business-critical functions where disruption is undesirable. For example, in process manufacturing where the metering of energy usage or rate of flow of fuel are critical to support the business operations of the customer.
Increasingly, assets need to be related to each other in sometimes complex ways. These complex relationships require modelling which is difficult to deliver using a traditional asset management system or asset registry approach.
For example, managers of safety and environmental procedures may have roles that cross existing asset management system boundaries. In this scenario, managing assets would require the ability to identify all the use cases and purposes applicable. This can be difficult as today’s asset management tools tend to be siloed to particular applications.
