Learning and Understanding How to Track Assets

Once upon a time, tracking assets was handled manually with a paper-based system or entered into an excel spreadsheet, which had the potential to be fraught with errors. Thanks to the benefits of modern asset management systems, they now solve numerous business challenges, offering a framework that allows companies to become more efficient and boost the bottom line by making the best use of existing resources to achieve results. While it sounds daunting, learning and understanding how to track assets with these types of systems is easier than ever.

Asset tracking involves managing the location of internal resources needed to continue operating; tracking items being used in or out of a facility; and monitoring depreciation, maintenance, and warranty contracts.

Whether tracking physical, mobile, or IT assets, you should know their status, location, maintenance schedule, etc. Being aware of these few basic pieces of information helps ensure that they don’t become lost or stolen, and it helps you to avoid all of the time, cost, and productivity required to locate or replace lost and missing assets. Additionally, if a business is ever faced with a theft, fire or natural disaster, a catalog of what’s owned is essential to obtain replacements for what’s been lost.

Tracking assets can be a time-consuming process if you don’t have the right tools. When looking at how to track assets, it’s imperative to look at programs available that have useful features, such as the ability to use a camera or mobile device to take pictures of assets or scan barcodes, that they have data recording and exporting capabilities, and of course their ease of use.

Effective asset tracking starts with a few fundamentals – knowing what you need to track; tracking assets immediately as they come into a company; selecting appropriate reporting and analytics functions; and embracing mobility. By getting the foundation in place, learning how to track your assets will come naturally and the associated tools and systems that enable asset tracking and software solutions will streamline data collection and analysis for you.

Mobile technology has truly simplified the asset tracking process and made it so much more efficient. Employees can record inventory transactions in the field with a smartphone, providing accurate, real time data of inventory and assets. More importantly, it can save a company valuable dollars on purchasing very expensive scanning hardware. The web-based software and mobile application should seamlessly work together. After an item has been scanned, the software knows what to encode into the system so that application will be able to read and process it, and the mobile app knows what information to expect, and how to send information back to the web application.

And when it comes to reporting and analytics functionality, there is a saying … “You can’t manage what you can’t measure and you can’t measure what you can’t see.” Asset tracking reports need to deliver real-time data at every level, from a snapshot of your asset locations to granular insights into asset actions including check out, maintenance history, and change history. This tool is critical in helping a company make confident business decisions.

Asset Panda’s Asset Tracking and Management Platform is the most flexible and customizable system in the industry for tracking and managing assets. With unlimited fields and configurability, Asset Panda changes as your needs change so that it’s always the perfect platform to meet goals or solve problems—about any number of assets and for any sized company, in any industry.

Asset Panda works the way you do, on devices you’re already using, both online and through our free mobile app, making it easy for all your users to access the information they need, when they need it, from wherever they happen to be working. On average, users can save two to five percent on their cost of total assets with Asset Panda, and Asset Panda’s robust suite of asset tracking tools replace spreadsheets, expensive scanners and costly software for asset tracking and management.

See why people all over the world are using Asset Panda with a free 14-day trial and learn how to track your assets in the most quick and efficient way imaginable. Visit www.assetpanda.com today.