Evaluating Your Return on Investment (ROI) In Asset Tracking Technology

#N/A

The phrase “return on investment” or ROI is a popular one in today’s business environment. Measuring the contribution that a given marketing program, tool, employee or program has on a company’s revenue and profits is how many organizations determine the viability of their investment. It’s easy to ask the question, “What kind of results do my [programs, offers, equipment, employee, etc] deliver?”  However, determining the answer can be somewhat difficult if you don’t know what to look for.

What is Return on Investment?

The business definition of Return on Investment (ROI) is a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. ROI tries to directly measure the amount of return on a particular investment, relative to the investment’s cost. To calculate ROI, the benefit (or return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment. The result is often expressed as a percentage or a ratio.

Try a Return on Investment Calculator

With an ROI calculator, you can easily find out what kind of results your company can expect from an asset tracking solution. In addition to revealing the cost of lost assets, it can show you the impact of your assets on your tax bill and provide an estimate of the time and money wasted by employees searching for assets with an inefficient solution.

Assets on the Move

Managing and tracking assets is a major part of how today’s businesses operate. Employees are constantly on the move. The “office” may be a warehouse one day, a coffee shop the next and an airport terminal a week later. And with employees on the go, so are the assets they use to conduct and operate daily operations. Equipment such as laptop computers, tablets, A/V equipment, and more goes where the business goes. Keeping track of it all from the moment it enters the business until its very last use is vital.

Nowadays, assets are viewed by a number of different departments within a company. From the actual user to the financial department, procurement, and IT. Let’s take a laptop computer for example. It no longer just gets checked out to an employee, never to be seen or thought of again. Multiple parties have an investment in the asset:

  • Finance Department. They track how much the laptop cost at purchase, and its annual depreciation value.
  • Procurement Department. They track who the laptop was purchased from, the price, the supplier.
  • Management/HR/Operations. They need to know where the laptop is, who it’s checked out to, a maintenance schedule to ensure that the downtime for servicing is accounted for when planning for upgrades, travel, etc., and its cost of maintenance for annual budgeting
  • IT/Support. They look to see how often the laptop has been serviced, evidence of its service records, and assurance that safety requirements have been met (if needed), upgrades, problems with the asset. They also need to be sure they have accurate data on the laptop make, model, serial number should they have to deal with the manufacturer.

Getting an ROI from Asset Tracking Software

So now that we see how many departments have an “investment” into each and every piece of equipment a company uses, employing an asset tracking software platform makes a lot of business sense.

When companies look into asset tracking software, the overall user experience is critical to ensuring any software purchase provides a positive ROI to the business. If it’s hard to use, takes hours of time to learn and operate, then you are simply wasting money and your return on investment into this software is a loss for you. User-friendly interfaces, minimal training time and an ability to use the software across multiple devices are what you want.

In order to determine that your asset tracking software of choice offers a real ROI for your business, it should offer you the following:

  • Awareness that all assets are fully accounted for, down to location, condition, and operating status, accessible anytime, from anywhere.
  • Ability to track and monitor scheduled maintenance.
  • Detailed reports with custom headings that fit the data requirements specific to your business.
  • Built-in barcode scanning technology that can be used from your employees’ own smartphones and tablets.
  • No extra hardware requirements, contracts or other hidden costs. You know what you are getting upfront.
  • Free/included mobile apps that sync with the cloud.
  • Extra features you can add on as needed such as specialized integrations, modules, video/photo recording, help desk ticketing.
  • Unparalleled customer service.

A highly customizable back-end, unlimited users, and anytime, anywhere access to vital business information are just a few features that set Asset Panda apart. Going beyond simple asset tracking, Asset Panda can help you create workflows and actions that enable you to replace time-consuming processes that slow down your business while tracking the entire lifecycle of your company’s assets at the same time.

You can access everything from anywhere with our free iOS and Android apps. No more worries about spending a fortune buying costly barcode scanning equipment and everyone will access to the tools they need wherever they are. Guesswork is a thing of the past. Your team will have real-time, up-to-date knowledge about your assets, where they are, what condition they are in, and so much more.

By:

Audra London

Audra London, founder of Conceptual Communications, LLC, has over 10 years of writing, public relations and marketing experience and serves as an expert on press releases, media relations, feature writing, web content and marketing copy.

Learn more from an Asset Panda expert

Get a FREE consultation with an asset tracking expert to find out how you can transform your asset tracking

Get a Demo