Analysing whether your business needs to implement an EAM or ERP system can be confusing. One system is directly linked to an overview of business assets, whereas the other system is designed to help streamline business processes.
But, which is the most effective enterprise management system to implement into your business?
What Can An EAM System Offer to a Business?
EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) aims to help a business manage its entire lifecycle of physical assets. The assets can be anything from machinery, tools, IT equipment, a fleet of vehicles, business properties and more.
The objective of effectively managing these business assets is to maximise each asset’s life cycle while reducing costs and boosting productivity and efficiency.
What Does An EAM System Do?
EAM software gives asset managers a holistic view of the entire collection of assets a company has. Although software can vary from vendor to vendor, each application may consist of:
- A centralised asset register to store all essential asset data. This information might include the purchase price, value, real-time location, and the history of any work done to maintain an asset.
- An effective maintenance scheduling and monitoring plan to reduce downtime and costs. This helps to manage work requests, plan and schedule maintenance work, and identify any potential issues with the equipment before problems arise.
- A complete inventory management overview to help robustly manage spares and stock, and identify where each part is located. It can also alert employees when quantities are running low.
- Continuous performance monitoring to provide a detailed overview of how each business asset is performing. This can be a crucial benefit when deciding between an EAM or ERP system.
- An analysis and reporting module which enables you to run custom reports about your assets to help with compliance, and to aid decision-making.
What Can An ERP System Offer to a Business?
ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning, aims to streamline and integrate essential business processes and activities. Examples of those include inventory management, accounting, CRM, and human resources.
How Can An ERP System Help?
ERP software helps businesses to centralise essential information through a shared database that can be used by different departments.
ERP software can offer many benefits to a company, including the following:
- It can effectively connect all business processes from end to end.
- ERP software can improve customer service by presenting a single overview of each customer data.
- It can also help to boost efficiency, by giving employees access to the information they need more quickly.
- Most vendors provide a modern system that is both mobile-friendly and cloud-based. Some solutions are even capable of linking to other business applications, such as Microsoft Power BI or email exchange software.
Although an ERP system can support asset management, it is more geared up for centralising core business information and managing day-to-day business operations.
Whereas EAM Software is designed specifically for asset management and features in-depth modules for monitoring and analysing the performance of assets.
When Should You Consider Either An EAM or ERP System?
Implementing either EAM or ERP software will mean a change to existing business processes. So it’s essential to undertake a thorough review to identify what type of system your business needs.
If your business relies heavily on its assets, an EAM system is crucial. For most companies, even small to medium-sized enterprises, deciding to implement an ERP system is a case of when rather than whether or not one is needed at all.
Managing without an ERP system will eventually impact on time and cost, and lead to errors or potentially the mismanagement of information. As a company grows, having the ability to manage core information in one central “hub” will help reduce costs, boost efficiency, and keep data flowing seamlessly.
Many companies consider an ERP system if they have outgrown their existing software, or if core business information is being managed across different units. Or consider it if existing software integrations are becoming too expensive.