Tracking Fixed Assets is Especially Critical During the Holidays

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Tracking fixed assets is no easy task any time of year, but the holiday season can pose an added challenge. Why? You’ve got employees taking time off and often bringing their company-issued assets (smartphones, tablets, laptop computers, etc.) home with them and on the road. These days, for better or worse, it’s rare that employees truly unplug from work when they take vacation. Whether their company-issued assets are sitting in a car, at home, in a coffee shop, airplane, cab, hotel or some other location, they can be at risk for theft. That’s serious enough, but when those devices aren’t locked down securely, your company’s sensitive data – and, potentially, your client/customer relationships -- may also be at risk. Regardless of your company’s size or what kind of business you’re in, you need a secure, powerful and easy to use means of tracking fixed assets. And it stands to reason that, the larger and more geographically spread out your organization becomes, the higher the stakes for your fixed assets. Despite technology’s mainstream role in our society, you might be surprised to learn that there are still companies out there who rely on pen and paper or an Excel spreadsheet for tracking fixed assets. Others may not use any system at all. Certainly, some system is better than no system, but manual asset tracking is both time-consuming and very error-prone. It’s difficult if not impossible to maintain accuracy, and manual records can’t be consolidated among multiple employees responsible for entering data.

The good news is that it’s never been easier to integrate a comprehensive system for tracking fixed assets into your business processes. You may not even realize how much you stand to gain until you see for yourself the significant and measurable efficiencies that asset tracking can bring.

With a good asset tracking system, you can create and apply unique barcodes to each of your assets, therefore giving them a distinguishing identifier. From there, you’re able to store any and all details about your fixed assets in one centralized location. No matter where an item travels, you know its whereabouts and the identity of who has it on an up-to-the-minute basis. Additionally, you have the asset’s complete maintenance history and its maintenance schedule, so you can create alerts that remind you to schedule inspections and other routine services. If an item requires repair, your asset tracking platform indicates whether the asset is covered for the service under warranty, or whether the warranty has expired. Best of all, a good tracking system curtails theft and loss, and prevents companies from throwing money away on insurance for ghost assets. Organizations can analyze their asset need across the entire board and make better-informed decisions about how many assets they truly require and where they should be utilized. There’s no more guesswork, frustration or wasted time searching for lost or stolen assets. And because you’re taking good care of your equipment and tools, you maximize their lifespan, prevent unnecessary breakdowns and replacements, and trim waste from your bottom line.

Asset Panda enables you to perform all of this monitoring and analysis – and so much more. Our mobile platform for tracking fixed assets is comprised of free iOS and Android apps that sync with the cloud, require no additional hardware to use and are incredibly intuitive, even for technophobes. In the palm of your hand (using a tablet or smartphone), you’ve got real-time access to the entire lifecycle of each of your fixed assets, including their condition, whereabouts, current value, complete maintenance history, warranty, insurance, and lease/purchase information, check-in/check-out status, even GPS coordinates. One of Asset Panda’s especially helpful features is its help desk function, which enables companies to assign technicians to an asset that requires service. This function then generates a ticket which is tracked from start to finish. Asset Panda is configurable, customizable and incredibly user-friendly – and it’s flexible enough to incorporate new technologies as they become available in the future.

To give you a better idea of how easy it is to perform custom actions with Asset Panda, watch this quick video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tZpM5iATow

Ready to learn more? Visit assetpanda.com, and find out how to start your free 14-day trial.
By:

Courtney Roush

Courtney Roush is a freelance writer, editor, and communications strategist with 25 years of experience. Her favorite discipline is crisis communications – and it’s a highly relevant one in our present times.

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