Administration – Assets Admin

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The most important asset to any business is its employees.  Following them in a close second are the tangible, physical or real assets that a company owns.  These assets are managed in the business applications suite so that they enjoy a complete lifecycle, monitoring their intrinsic value, maintenance status and who in your business currently uses each asset your company owns.

Assets work hand in hand with your support desks or help desks and even allow the routine safekeeping, health monitoring and status monitoring of each asset.

A standalone mobile application that is capable of scanning the asset tags (QR-Codes based) also exists within the suite; but this does not require any administrative set up or configuration.

The Asset Management application suite has a basic administrative overhead which is centered around the categories of assets your business owns, where you buy them from, their current status and their physical locations.

Don’t forget to set the preferred business process workflow for your assets so that employees requesting repair or maintenance of the assets they are using can be suitably offered.  This includes the workflow for approvals of course.  Each asset that you business owns has a value on purchase and then this value degrades over time. The solution will automatically track the inherent value of all of your assets and it links seamlessly to contracts management, supplier management and help desks.  For example, if an employee/user or a technician changes the status of an asset to ‘needs servicing’ then not only is the authorisations process kicked into gear but a trouble ticket is opened with the facilities team so that they can get one of their sevice engineers to conduct the service.  Approvals, Notifications and Actions; automated.

Dictionaries

  • Category

    Asset Category is a dynamic heirarchical dictionary that allows you to define the asset categories you use across your business.  Being heirarchical you may define nested levels of assets, for example, Car and Van are both subordinate to the Category of ‘Vehicles’.  Furniture may have children of Desks, Chairs, Bookshelf and so on.  Define your own asset category tree to that the entries are available for users of the main Asset Management application.

    Please note, the closure code functionality has not yet been realised within the platform. Whilst you may complete the field as you see fit it will not be used when help desk tickets associated with this code are closed (that is its eventual intended use). For the immediate future please disregard the Closure Code element of any Category.

  • Manufacturer
    Maintain your dictionary of manufacturers of the assets that you provide to your users/business.  This is distinct to their suppliers which is managed in CRM and Contracts Management.  When adding new manufacturers only the name is mandatory, not the manufacturer code or the description.
  • Status
    Your assets always have some form of current status.  In use, out on loan, in storage and so on. Define your own dictionary list of asset statuses in this dictionary.
  • Check Assets Status

    The Check Asset Status is a dynamic dictionary where you create and store the various statuses that are available to an engineer/technician or other servicing representative that has cause to check on the current status of an asset.  If you enable an ‘alert’ with any given status then a workflow of your choosing is triggered to run when this status is used.  The end user of the asset is also informed of a change in status by default for any assets assigned to them as a user.

    If you select the ‘Enable Alert’ tickbox when adding a new status you are then prompted to select the relevant workflow that you’d like to trigger when the alert changes to this current status.  For example, if you set a new status to be ‘Requires Servicing’ then choose a workflow that requires a line manager approval on the asset.  That way the manager may approve the service request from their subordinate user.  This change in status is triggered by the end user of the asset in the Add Check Record function of the main Assets application or by another user (for example a maintenance technician) using the mobile asset management application whilst recording the results of a review/maintenance visit.

    You can then select whether or not a help desk ticket is raised, to automatically add the service request to the relevant help desk.  This will put the asset directly into a ‘requires service’ status whilst creating the help desk ticket to the facilities team.

    Use your imagination here.  You can automate even elaborate notifications, enhanced workflows and even create the service request to conduct the repairs in one go!

    Create as many Check Asset Status rules as you like to satisfy the needs of your users.

  • Assets Locations
    Use this dictionary to store the addresses and detailed descriptions as to where the asset is being used.  This is especially relevant if you are loaning out the asset as it may be used on a site which is not integral to your business, like a customers/clients house, yard and so on.  This allows the detailed location attributes of each asset to be documented and kept up to date as it moves status, user, location etc