9 Easy Ways to Keep Your Asset Management System up to Date

Signs Your Asset Management System Is Out of Date

If two or more of these sound familiar, your asset management system needs attention:

• Staff keep their own spreadsheets alongside the system because they don’t trust its data.
• Physical audits regularly find assets in different locations from the ones recorded, or can’t find recorded assets at all.
• The same asset appears twice under slightly different names.
• Reports need manual correction before they go to finance or leadership.
• People who have left the organisation still have active logins.
• You’re on an old version of the software, or new features have been released that nobody uses.
• You don’t know how many licences you’re paying for versus how many people log in.

1. Cleanse Your Asset Register Data

Clean data is the foundation of every other step, so review the fields that change most, such as location, assigned user, status and condition, every 12 to 16 weeks. Assets that move often, like laptops, tools and mobile plant, may need checking monthly. Buildings and fixed equipment can wait longer.

A few habits stop the register degrading between reviews:

• Set naming conventions: Agree one format for asset names and IDs (for example, site code, asset type, number) so the same pump doesn’t appear as “Pump 3” and “P-003”.
• Enforce one way in: In larger organisations, configure the software so new assets can only be added through one route, such as a form with mandatory fields or a barcode scan, not free-text entry by anyone.
• Archive, don’t delete: Retired assets should be archived with a disposal reason and date. Deleting them breaks historical reports and your audit trail.
• Refresh asset photos: A current photo taken on a phone speeds up identification in the field and shows condition over time.
• Check the register against reality: Schedule physical verification by site or asset class, using barcode or RFID scans, so the register matches what’s actually there.

2. Manage Your Software Fields

Your fields should match how your team talks about assets, not the vendor’s defaults. Rename generic labels (“Custom Field 4”) to the terms your business uses, and remove fields nobody fills in. Every unused field adds noise to forms and reports.

Put the most-used and mandatory fields at the top of each form. Use dropdowns and validation rules wherever you can, because a picklist of 20 approved locations produces far cleaner data than a free-text box.

Review user access at the same time. Remove leavers, check that permission levels still match people’s roles, and make sure only a small group can change field settings. Out-of-date access is a data quality risk and a security one.

3. Fine-Tune Your Asset Management Reports

A small set of reports people actually use beats dozens that nobody opens. Ask each report owner what decision the report supports. If nobody can answer, retire it.

After every upgrade or configuration change, spot-check your key reports against known figures. Changes to fields or filters can quietly alter what a report counts.

Add a data quality report to your set. Useful measures include:

• The share of assets with every mandatory field completed.
• The share of assets physically verified in the last 12 months.
• The number of records with overdue inspections or expired warranties.

4. Hold Quarterly Asset Management System Reviews With Your Users

Meet your main users every quarter to find out what’s slowing them down before they stop using the system. Keep the agenda fixed so meetings stay short and comparable:

• Review usability
• Make a note of software bugs
• List your own dissatisfactions
• Listen to your user’s feedback
• Try and involve someone from the software vendor
• Let users review the workflow – most workflows can be enhanced every six months so take every opportunity to fine-tune your system

Record every agreed action in a simple change log with an owner and a date. Next quarter, start by reviewing that log. Users who see their feedback acted on keep using the system properly.

5. Review Your Asset Management Software Supplier Every Six Months

A six-monthly review with your vendor keeps the relationship focused on results rather than support tickets. Cover how the implementation is performing against the goals you bought the system for, any open bugs, and what’s on the vendor’s product roadmap. Customers who give regular, specific feedback have a better chance of influencing that roadmap.

Use the same meeting to check cost. Compare the number of licences you pay for with the number of people who actually log in. Unused licences add up quickly.

6. Run Regular Asset Management Software Training

Short, frequent sessions keep users confident with the system. A 45-minute lunch-and-learn run by a power user, someone from your own team who knows the system well, often works better than long vendor-led training because the examples come from your own assets and processes.

Time training around three moments:

1. Onboarding: New starters should learn the system in their first week, before they pick up bad habits from colleagues.
2. Before major releases: Show users what’s changing before it lands, not after they’ve found it themselves.
3. When data quality drops: If your data quality report shows a team skipping fields or scans, a targeted refresher usually fixes it faster than a reminder email.

7. Use Support Tickets to Find Weak Spots in Your Asset Management System

Your support log shows where the system is failing users. Ask one power user to review tickets each month and group them by cause. Repeated “how do I” questions point to a training gap. Repeated errors on the same screen point to a usability or configuration problem. A spike after an update points to a release issue you should raise with the vendor.

Check your integrations at the same time. Most asset management systems exchange data with other software, such as finance, HR, IT service management or device management tools. When a sync fails quietly, new starters don’t get assets assigned, disposals don’t reach the fixed asset register, and the two systems drift apart. Look at sync error logs monthly and spot-check a handful of records in both systems.

8. Balancing Your Asset Management Software Upgrades

Don’t be the first to upgrade, but don’t be the last either. Software companies sometimes rush out new releases, it is best to let the new release be widely adopted and any early bugs resolved before upgrading.The safest time to take an upgrade is soon after release, once early adopters have found the worst bugs, but not so late that you fall behind on fixes and support.

How you manage that depends on how your software is delivered:

• On-premise software: You control the timing. Test each new release on a test server or a single machine with a copy of your data before rolling it out, and check your key reports and integrations still work.
• Cloud software: The vendor usually controls release timing. Read the release notes before each update, test changes in a sandbox environment if your plan includes one, and switch on new features for a pilot group before everyone.

9. Benchmark Your Asset Management System Before Renewal

Always look out for new Asset Management Software options – this will allow you to be up to date on new features, new interfaces, the latest asset management methodologies and software pricing. A good way to do this is by looking out for free trials.

Remember, when deciding to switch your asset management system, keeping your eyes open always pays off.

Asset Management Software can help deliver real value to your organisation. If your asset value is £10 million and if your software helps you get 2% more efficiency from your assets, then that is £200,000 gained.