Without good quality asset data, facilities management teams can’t make informed decisions about their asset portfolio. Questions such as which brands make the most reliable equipment, which models regularly fail their annual inspections, and which assets are impacting revenue because their useful service life has ended, can’t be answered.
But gathering and maintaining accurate asset data is often put on the back burner. It can be a time consuming, manual, and expensive process, adding to the workload of the already-busy facilities team or requiring hiring an external resource, the cost of which can be prohibitive, even for a relatively small estate.
When companies do embark on their journey to make their CMMS smarter by adding asset data, the stumbling block is often the poor state of the source data. This is often made worse by using spreadsheets to manage complex estates.
Many organizations don’t have a complete view of what assets they own, let alone where the assets are, or how they are performing. And for those companies that do have some sort of asset register, the data is often inconsistent or incomplete, lacking key fields such as ‘location’ or ‘condition’.
One solution to this challenge would be to implement an asset-focussed computerized maintenance management system, such as Techniche CMMS, with built-in, robust tools for asset management, maintenance, and surveying.
What might a good asset register look like?
When building an asset register, it is important to ask what a good asset register looks like, and how much data is too much data? To achieve valuable insights, outcomes, reporting and analytics, a balance is required between usability and granularity.
In the past, we have worked with organisations using over three thousand repair codes to log different faults. Asset data that is this detailed is not pragmatic. Staff using the system to log work orders can easily pick the wrong option, or simply opt for the first and most convenient option item in a dropdown menu, resulting in polluted and inaccurate data.
Once a good asset register has been established, maintaining it must become part of the day-to-day operations of the facilities management team for it add real value.
Equipping your team with a CMMS mobile app which incorporates asset management functionality is a great way of encouraging staff and contractors to update asset data out in the field, ensuring that changes to new or existing assets are made on the spot and not forgotten about by waiting until they “get back to the office”.
What about benchmarking?
In today’s economic climate where reducing costs continues to become even more pressing, the proactive management of assets is where the focus needs to be.
However, an accurate asset register must be up and running as an integral part of the maintenance process before benchmarking of assets can begin.
Comparing the performance and lifespans of different brands and models across an estate means budget forecasting and planning for replacements is dramatically improved with an accurate asset register. In some sectors, the impact of environmental variables, such as altitude or climate, can have a real impact on asset performance and can be incorporated into the reporting and analytics.
But aren’t asset surveys an expensive business?
To ensure that asset management processes and practices are being followed, it is important to annually survey the estate, to make sure that the asset register is accurate, that the correct assets are in the correct places, and nothing has slipped through the gaps.
Often this vital step is missed due to the perceived cost, which has historically come from outside companies who specialise in asset surveys marching around sites armed with clipboards.
Today, costs can be negligible with many CMMS offering a survey tool in their platform and mobile app. A survey for an organisation with robust asset management practices can be conducted by site staff and completed in as little as an hour per site, split over multiple days to really reduce the burden. Ten minutes on day one to whip round and scan the QR asset tags on the coffee machines, fifteen minutes on day two to go through the POS systems, ten minutes on days three, four and five to capture all the critical and revenue generating assets, and they’re done.
Any anomalies identified by the survey can be corrected, and then inform which process or parties need to adjust their approach to ensure that the future data is as accurate as possible, and that the reporting and analytics can shine.