What Is Asset Management? Challenges And Benefits Of Automating It

What is Asset Management

IT asset management is the process of maintaining, deploying, upgrading, and disposing of assets of an organization. It involves tracking and utilizing valuable items like hardware, software systems, or information. 

Imagine all the hardware, such as laptops, printer, projector, etc., in an organization that needs regular maintenance and updates. The various applications and software also need regular updates and renewals. Creating a tab showing all the asset's expiry and update timing is instrumental in keeping a check on all the assets. Asset management is becoming a more important part of any organization's overall strategy as different teams push for tools that best fit their needs. 

What are the advantages of Asset Management?

The benefits of asset management directly contribute to the availability of relevant information and improve various asset management. It helps the organization keep a tab of all their assets and check its requirements and needs. 

Advantages of asset management

1. It helps manage risks and manage them at an early stage, which assists their management.
   
   
2. It is a systematic approach to the management of assets.
   
   
3. It helps improve employees' productivity and efficiency as there is better and systematic access to the information.
   
   
4. It helps keep track of the performance of assets.
   
   
5. It helps in identifying the unnecessary assets and avoid their under-utilization.
   
   
6. It improves the delivery potential of the assets.
   
   
7. It minimizes the costs involved.
   
   
8. It provides to the organization.
   
   

Challenges of asset management

Creating an asset inventory is a tiresome and tedious task but a crucial one! It involves its own challenges: 

• Manual data entries are the never-ending process.
  
  
• There is an escalated risk of errors and inaccuracy of data.
  
  
• Unstructured and raw data that does not add any value is another challenge.
  
  
• Lack of tracking system in place.
  
  
• Repetitive and mundane entries.
  
  
• No real-time reporting of adding or changes in data.
  
  
• Not updating the data regularly.
  
  

With the ever-evolving technology of artificial intelligence, we can create and maintain an asset inventory with a short amount of time. The asset management process entails the full life cycle of an asset, from the purchase to the costs and profits. 

It's noted that the alternative approach will hold 49% of global revenue and represent 17% of assets management into an $18 trillion industry. (source) Leveraging the power of artificial intelligence drastically improves the creation, maintaining, and analyzing the asset inventory process. It reduces the workload and delivers powerful insights into the data provided. 48% consider automation as the top priority in the management of assets for 2021. (source) 

Benefits of automating asset management

1. Helps in managing assets from several departments at the same time.
   
   
2. Drastically improves the time management
   
   
3. Improves the functionality of the assets
   
   
4. The assets inventory can be accessed multiple at once.
   
   
5. Provides real-time updates on assets for better analysis.
   
   
6. Improves the response to emergencies or unexpected risks
   
   
7. It extends the life of assets.
   
   
8. Automation significantly cuts down the costs of maintaining an asset inventory.
   
   
9. It helps meeting the compliance requirements.
   
   
10. Easily integrated with multiple interfaces.
    
    

Asset management is a humongous task and requires skilled professionals together with dedication and accuracy. About 50% of finance and accounting professionals indicate the rise of automation in how the company works. (source) 

The manual process is risk-prone, but with automation, it can be drastically eased and solves a major issue of the employees and improves their productivity with accurate, reliable, and relevant information on employees' fingertips.