Asset management is the practice of overseeing all the property a company owns, whether it’s equipment, technology, a building, a vehicle, or a related item. However, today’s modern business may have multiple locations spread out across the world and employees working remotely from their homes or other spaces. You might wonder how organizations can still procure, track, maintain, and retire their assets effectively? It’s possible through remote asset management.
What is remote asset management?
As the name suggests, remote asset management involves overseeing a company’s assets from a remote location. Whether they’re looking after the physical infrastructure of a building, the heavy equipment in a factory, or the laptops and mobile phones in an office, remote asset managers use software tools to ensure all assets provide value to the organization. Remote asset management is a particularly important part of IT asset management.
It’s vital to keep an eye on all assets in a company’s portfolio across each stage of the asset lifecycle, which includes planning or creation, acquisition or procurement, operations and maintenance, and disposal. This way, organizations can make better decisions about how to take care of the asset and what steps they should take next to ensure the asset helps the company operate as intended. For example, if a software license is near the end of its operations and maintenance phase, it may not be worth renewing the license because the company will need to dispose of it soon.
Matt Picheny, an experienced real estate asset manager who manages his company’s portfolio remotely, notes that having an in-person presence is still important. “I try to visit assets once a quarter, but we do have partners who have a local presence,” he says. “Visits can be both announced or unannounced so you can see what’s going on at the location of the asset.”
What are the benefits of remote asset management?
Remote asset management offers many advantages for both employees and organizations:
- Maintaining internal compliance: When employees are located in disparate spaces, it can be difficult to ensure they’re abiding by specific policies and processes. Remote asset management ensures employees, regardless of location, use and treat assets as intended. This prolongs the life of each asset.
- Increasing productivity: When a critical asset goes down and requires repair or replacement, operations can come to a halt. However, when an organization proactively maintains the asset through remote asset management, it can keep productivity up.
- Reducing loss and theft: It can be challenging to know the physical location of each asset, which may lead to loss or theft, particularly for unfixed and small assets, such as laptops. Having a way to remotely track the location of each asset and who it’s assigned to can greatly reduce the expenses that come with loss and theft. In some cases, notes Picheny, cameras can help maintain security.
- Understanding asset value: What’s the total cost of ownership of each asset? Which assets require the most repairs? Which assets directly contribute to revenue? Which locations lose the most assets? Remote asset management can answer these types of questions and more so organizations have a better understanding of their portfolio.
What are some helpful remote asset management tools?
Remote asset management requires the right tools so organizations can remain connected to their assets even when they’re in different locations around the world. Here are some of the most helpful remote asset management tools:
If your organization has multiple offices or assets in various locations or has employees who work from home or from the road, it’s important to consider remote asset management to keep better track of your portfolio. If this is a new task for you, Picheny notes that there’s a lot of overlap between project management skills and remote asset management skills. “We have weekly asset management calls and keep communicating frequently. It’s also important to customize KPIs for the type of asset to measure performance.”
Now that you know what remote asset management is, the benefits it can provide your organization, and some tools you can use to implement it, it’s time to get started.
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