The ability to produce real-time reports is an essential feature to look out for when investing in an enterprise asset management (EAM) system. Real-time reporting can help your business become more efficient and lead to better strategic decision-making.
This article explains the benefits of real-time reports for businesses and explores some examples of enterprise assets that can be tracked and monitored in real-time.
What Are Real-time Reports in EAM?
An EAM system provides a bird’s eye view of a company’s physical assets and covers asset lifecycle. An asset’s lifecycle starts at procurement (or design) to operation and maintenance right through to disposal and replacement. Asset tracking is an EAM system feature that allows businesses to track an asset’s location and performance in real-time.
Real-time reporting provides businesses with crucial asset-related data, which, in turn, can help to drive efficient operations. A robust EAM solution will have a customisable reporting feature. This allows enterprises to configure reports to capture the data that matters most and adapt reports as circumstances change.
Types of Enterprise Assets That Can Be Monitored in Real-time
Many enterprise assets will benefit from real-time monitoring and reporting. Here are some specific examples:
- A fleet of vehicles – a fleet manager needs to understand where the company’s vehicles are at all times. They also need to be able to track information like route mapping, fuel consumption, driver behaviour and other engine-related data.
- Human assets – enterprises with staff that are always on the move need to track each employee’s whereabouts to make sure they’re in the right place at the right time. A couple of examples here are field workers (e.g. telecom engineers) and airport staff.
- Manufacturing assets – car manufacturers, for example, use various types of machinery, conveyor belts and robots in day-to-day operations. These too can be monitored in real-time to ensure that each piece of equipment is in service and working effectively.
- IoT assets – connected assets located across different sites may need to have real-time monitoring installed to capture environmental factors. IoT asset tags can be fitted with sensors that track temperatures, proximity, humidity or pressure. Examples are chilled courier vehicles or static assets such as vending machines and air conditioning units.
- IT assets – enterprises rely on their IT assets for business to run normally. It’s imperative that when an IT device needs attention, the problem is identified and resolved as quickly as possible. IT asset monitoring with real-time reports makes this possible.
- Parcels – a delivery company will use barcode or GPS tracking on customer orders to ensure they are safely delivered. Some organisations offer their customers real-time parcel monitoring via an app so that customers can pinpoint a more precise delivery window.
The Benefits of Real-time Reports for Your Enterprise Assets
Asset managers need to be able to spot problems with equipment and rectify them before more significant issues arise. Real-time tracking and reporting enable this to happen. Let’s consider the direct benefits for some of the asset examples mentioned above.
Benefits For Vehicle Fleets
Fleet managers can use real-time reports to locate vehicles and plan out more cost-efficient routes based on average fuel consumption. They could look at driver performance data to identify those drivers that require further training to be safer on the road.
Benefits of Tracking Staff
Businesses can understand employee attendance and observe the number of hours worked. On a large site, like an airport, knowing where employees are is essential to security protocols.
Benefits for Maintenance Teams
Real-time reports are particularly useful for field workers and project managers. A maintenance technician who has responded to a job can log the details into his or her mobile device. Real-time reporting will enable a team leader to see straight away that the work has been completed. The team leader could then assign another work request to the same technician without losing any time in waiting for data.
Strategic Benefits
In addition to the above, real-time reports can help a business to understand where assets are in their lifecycle, and the associated performance and ongoing cost of them. Real-time reports can typically be set up to generate hourly, weekly, daily or monthly reports automatically. This data can be used to support financial audits and help with compliance.
Summary
An enterprise can save a significant amount of time and money by having critical asset-related information available through real-time reports. When researching EAM providers, check that real-time reports can be easily customised so you can filter and extract the precise information you need.
In the meantime, you might like to read our Buyer’s Guide for EAM Software. As well as real-time reports, it covers four other factors to consider when shortlisting EAM system providers.