Disaster Planning for Your Office Inventory

You never want to think about worst case scenarios when it comes to your business, but unfortunately, accidents and catastrophic events happen. Being prepared for any type of scenario includes keeping up to date records of your office inventory and knowing what you have and where it all is.

Chances are that office inventory management isn’t high up on your daily checklist of activities. Monitoring assets and inventory fall to an office manager or maybe another employee who is tasked with the overall tracking and management of assets. The need for good office inventory tracking becomes more obvious when an item is lost or misplaced or you run out of a particular item that is needed. When that happens, productivity comes to a halt, time is wasted looking for the missing asset and you may even be wasting money buying a replacement item.

Thankfully, today’s asset tracking and management technology are able to help businesses stay on top of the typically time-consuming task of asset tracking and enables employees to better anticipate and avoid preventable problems.

 

"30% of all organizations do not know what they own, where their assets are located, or who is using them. "

 

But what about if you face some sort of disaster … a break-in and theft, a fire or a natural disaster like a tornado or earthquake? How does disaster planning for your office inventory work? Easy … it’s the same as a general asset and inventory planning and management and the process has been simplified and streamlined which saves your organization time and money.

Whether you are just getting a general baseline of your office inventory or planning for a disaster, employing an asset tracking and management system can prove to be invaluable. Consider this fact, 30% of all organizations do not know what they own, where their assets are located, or who is using them. Businesses are literally throwing money away when they don’t know what assets they have. For many, the thought of going through each and every item in their office inventory is completely overwhelming and determining the actual value of their assets and evaluating other influential factors can take hours. Many settle for just entering data into an online spreadsheet that other employees share. But data can be incorrect, mis-keyed, or not entered at all. These days when companies are needing instant access to assets and the data about them, companies and their employees rely on up-to-date information and knowledge about their vital assets.

Consider this scenario … What if your business lost everything in say, a fire, how would you report what was destroyed and needed to be replaced to your insurance company? If you stored your asset data on the hard drive of a computer that was destroyed in the fire, then all that information is lost. If you wrote it down in a ledger and it was burned to ashes how would you know what you had?

That’s where mobile asset tracking comes in. Today’s asset tracking technology provides anywhere/anytime access to real-time data about your assets, making it easy to verify whether you’ve already purchased an item, track down an existing item, and send reports straight to insurance providers and other necessary parties should the unthinkable happen. Many software programs come with free mobile apps that sync with the cloud and include a mobile barcode scanner that employees can use from their own smartphones and tablets. That ensures that all of your data is current and accessible 24/7 no matter what has happened at the office.

Asset Panda’s simple, yet powerful mobile platform centralizes your inventory and asset data for everyday needs as well as emergency situations. Asset Panda puts that information within your reach, in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week no matter where you are in the world. We invested years of research, development, and testing before launching a flexible, completely customizable office inventory solution for companies and organizations in nearly every industry. The app is incredibly intuitive and user-friendly and requires no special training to master completely customizable. You can display and organize your data in the way that makes the most sense for your organization. A built-in mobile scanner is accessible from employees’ smartphones and tablets and can include data such as photos, videos, lease/purchase contracts and so much more – all vital when it comes to dealing with insurance in the case of a catastrophe or doing a basic office audit.

At Asset Panda, our philosophy is that you should be able to track your assets any way you want. Now is the right time to get your office inventory prepared with Asset Panda. Your company and employees will all benefit in the end. Learn more by visiting www.assetpanda.com and get a free 14-day trial.