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here is no denying the fact that modern businesses heavily depend on their physical assets to effectively cope up with the market demands. However, asset management is a process that helps organizations get more value from an asset and attain business goals. Several organizations in the present competitive market invest a huge portion of their budget on software assets management. Most of the time, these firms use the IT assets randomly. Few years down the line some of these assets become outdated. While IT professionals also struggle to maintain those software assets. Often, the manual process gives inaccurate results. Undoubtedly, asset management provides organizations the scope to improve their business efficiency in operation and management for the entire IT infrastructure. Moreover, using software asset management (SAM) tools you can optimize your IT environment and at the same time systematically use your resources. 

Three types of asset management 

There are three types of asset management that businesses follow. 

  • Physical asset management – it is the process of managing things like fixed assets, inventory, infrastructure, and public assets. 
  • Financial asset management –defines a process of monitoring and managing procurement, creating an investment strategy, controlling budget, costs, and stocks. 
  • Compliance management –this will help you streamline the processes for managing IT assets, digital assets, contractual maintenance, and managing non-physical assets. 

 Managing assets a major concern 

In larger organizations, the main issue is monitoring and managing existing assets manually. When your assets are outdated, you can’t get the latest features and end up with a loss or compromised.  Apart from this, there are other factors which are basically hurdles for managing those assets: 

  • Manual entry of data and error-ridden processes produce inaccurate results 
  • Lack of structured asset management process 
  • Without proper authority, no enforcement of asset management policies 
  • Poor change management 
  • No proper monitoring and reporting of real-time asset value and location 
  • Inefficacy of assessing the potential risk and no preventive measures. 

 Implementing Asset Management for business efficiency 

With an established process, you can improve your business operation and overall productivity in your organization. Because an effective asset management process can help organizations monitor and manage their assets with a systematic approach. Further, organizations can increase the return on investments.  Let us discuss some best practices for asset management.

 Locate your IT assets globally 

From a broader perspective, locate your assets geographically. Though it’s a difficult task to do manually, you can use an IT Asset Management (ITAM) tool that can easily track where your assets located across the organization. It is especially beneficial when an organization operates in multiple cities. It will help you better maintain inventory, and let you know which assets are always available. Also, it will help you to know where you can allocate those. 

 Manage asset lifecycle  

Tracking all assets associated with your business is very crucial. So, asset management also monitors the complete lifecycle of your business assets. This includes new asset requests, approval for that, purchasing, acquisition, provisioning, reusing assets and elimination of outdated products or systems. An effective asset management strategy can help to establish the proper procedure for a smooth function of business operation. Managing every part of the asset lifecycle can assist a business by providing quality services with competent resources and keeps them informed to make the right decisions. 

Learn your resources 

The IT environment of an organization should have the clarity of what assets, whether hardware or software, are allocated to which resources. This allows an administrator to closely monitor the assets for when they need maintenance, upgrades or replacement. This type of proactive approach truly enhances their lifetime value and helps to monitor their real-time cost for the business. Moreover, this is also a great security measure for when an employee quits the organization. The admin will come to know exactly what that employee had access to and can save the software on the system and reuse the hardware. 

 Check accountability 

In many cases, several organizations give devices to their employees. This can be giving a laptop or a hard-drive and external storage or a mobile. So, the asset management strategy builds such a program to capture all the phases from allocation to return and repair if needed. The system will track all the devices that employees got and when those are due to receive or upgrade. Obviously, this ensures the employees’ accountability and therefore helps minimize any security risks. Besides that, it also helps the admin guy to maintain control over all the devices. Because it is their responsibility for the allocation of devices and keep them safe. An ITAM tool or software can help to streamline the processes and monitor all the phases for purchasing, distribution, maintenance, upgrades, and repairs. 

Automation of processes 

Effective an asset management program helps you to build an automation process in your operation. It will facilitate a seamless and automated process with asset tags, specific tools, and software. Each asset tag has accurate information so that the program can read it and virtually eliminate the errors due to manual entry of records. It encourages you to focus on micro-managing every step and overseeing the streamlined processes. In addition to that, you can customize a program to execute the process which will be unique to your business. 

 How does it benefit 

If you implement and handle asset management properly, you will surely get the benefits. You can see an improvement in efficiency and productivity. Specifically, the right asset management is beneficial for substantial tax savings and financial development. Whatsoever, proper asset management helps the companies for greater profitability and at the same time improves asset tracking and inventory procedures. 

If you’re looking for the perfect asset management solution, then go with a solution provider that will help your business to manage your entire IT assets and at the same time, extend their life so that they can operate economically and efficiently.