Online Asset Management Tools —

Connecting Purchasing With Asset Management 

It happens far too often; Purchasing receives a request to order more hardware, so they check a few vendors for availability and pricing and then place the order. What’s wrong with this scenario?  Without asset management, purchasing doesn’t know that they already have the assets they need sitting in a closet in a not-so-remote office. They could have saved money by requesting the assets be transferred instead of making a purchase. Some creative professionals turn to an Excel spreadsheet or a homegrown tool to track their assets to solve this problem. However, having the data in Excel scattered across multiple spreadsheets can be problematic. In some cases, you might have asset locations in one spreadsheet. Meanwhile, you maintain a list of contracts in a separate spreadsheet. Employees will spend a tremendous amount of time attempting to keep up with all of the assets within their organization. It can decrease the organization’s productivity as people run around trying to maintain spreadsheets and figure out hardware and software usage. All the while, assets are not being utilized to their fullest potential. This process creates information silos and leads to chaos.  

Getting Purchasing the Tools They Need

When you improve your purchasing process, you improve the financial performance of your organization. A reliable way to manage assets offers the following benefits:
  • Store contracts along with terms and conditions
  • Track software maintenance, asset costs, and depreciation
  • Track software licenses and hardware inventory from initial acquisition through retirement 
Preventive maintenance: an online asset management tool provides new opportunities for preventative maintenance. This maintenance makes financial sense because well-maintained assets last longer. Preventive maintenance checks also help you identify possible problems with an asset before it breaks down and requires replacement hardware. These assets can operate for additional time and make working capital available for other projects, as well as increase profits. Improve scheduled maintenance: with scheduled maintenance, it becomes possible to schedule during non-peak hours, like weekends or even during slower times of the year. This scheduling can lower the impact of downtime for that asset when it undergoes maintenance. Unexpected downtime can cause damage to a company’s reputation and brand, so planning ahead is important.   Lower cost: preventative maintenance scheduling with an online asset management tool allows you to forecast your maintenance events and lower costs. This enables you to schedule staffing so that you can reduce overtime related to scheduled maintenance.  Fewer disruptions: preventative maintenance can lead to fewer disruptions throughout the workday. This allows employees to maintain their workflow and improve efficiency.   

Purchasing Connected

Don’t waste time having employees run around the organization updating spreadsheets with hardware, software, and contract information. As soon as everything is up-to-date, something is likely to be moved, making it inaccurate.  Adopt our online asset management tool, ChannelView. ChannelView helps Purchasing understand assets on-hand versus assets that need to be ordered. This information will save both time and resources. Optimizing the assets you already have will ultimately have a positive impact on your bottom line.  Set up a demo with one of our experts to talk more about ChannelView.

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