Location-Enabled Asset Management
Organizations in almost every market face increasing pressure to manage assets in more efficient and cost-effective ways. Forward-thinking managers are striving for better ways to increase the productivity of their assets, proactively maintain them, and maximize their usefulness over the asset management lifecycle.
In today’s world, where asset are increasingly mobile, distributed and shared across workgroups, knowing the location of those assets is critical to effectively managing them. Providing relevant, timely and useful location information to the people and systems responsible for managing asset-intensive business processes provides a number of significant benefits:
-
Make quick, informed decisions based on real-time business information
-
Reduce costs associated with searching for misplaced or lost assets
-
Reduce equipment maintenance costs
-
Improve asset and staff workflow
-
Improve overall productivity and throughput
-
Meet industry and/or government mandates and regulations
Location-enabled asset management can benefit asset-intensive processes across many vertical markets and management functions. Examples include:
Healthcare
Routine maintenance of biomedical equipment is compromised by the inability to find it, which in turn increases the risk that hospitals will fail to meet stringent Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) regulations requiring timely equipment maintenance. Location-enabled asset management in hospitals can help biomed departments find the equipment and get it back into service as efficiently as possible. This unlocks equipment-related cost reductions and allows biomed managers to spend less time looking for equipment and more time on repairs and preventative maintenance..
Manufacturing
Many manufacturing facilities, particularly large industrial environments, utilize mobile production and test gear, vehicles and other equipment that are critical to the production line operating smoothly. Often this equipment is widely dispersed and can be difficult to find. Matching the correct piece of equipment or tooling to the manufacturing process at the right time is especially crucial in lean or just-in-time environments. Location-enabled asset management enables workers to quickly find the equipment and tooling they need to keep production processes operating at optimal levels, thereby lowering costs and increasing uptime.
Warehousing/Transportation
Logistics operators often manage many different types of equipment, trailers and containers. Location-enabled asset management helps track these assets in both outdoor yard and indoor warehouse environments. Knowing their location helps reduce logistics bottlenecks and expedites the shipping process by optimizing asset deployment to locations of greatest need.
IT Management
Keeping track of valuable equipment across large facilities with hundreds or thousands of IT assets (i.e., servers, notebooks, PC's, PDA's) is a daunting task. Computing and IT equipment often contain sensitive and valuable information, yet these assets are seldom properly protected against indiscriminate access, loss or theft. In addition, government regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley are guiding organizations towards more timely and accurate accounting for valuable assets, better asset management and control. As a result, organizations are taking enterprise asset management more seriously than ever. To help take control of their assets, IT professionals are turning to RTLS and RFID technologies that offer real time asset-tracking capabilities, enabling them to clamp down on loose security and asset management practices that leave open the risk of having valuable corporate information fall into the wrong hands.
Whether you are an organization needing to location-enable your asset management processes or a vendor looking to integrate location information from best-in-class RTLS and RFID technologies into your asset management system, Vision™ from InnerWireless can help.
|
