Enterprise Asset Management software (or popularly known as EAM) can be defined as a utilitarian kind of facility management software that allows organizations to effectively control, analyze, and maintain their physical assets and infrastructure.
An enterprise asset management software finds an immense number of applications in industries that heavily rely on complex and costly physical assets, such as vehicles, plants, and heavy equipment. This is the primary reason that the prominent users of this software include the mining, energy, oil and gas, shipbuilding, aerospace, and defense industries.
With the help of an EAM, you can analyze and track your asset data across all phases of the asset life cycle, namely, acquisition, maintenance, and disposal.
On that note, let’s take a look at some of the key ways in which EAMs help keep track of your assets.
Asset Life Cycle Management
It is common knowledge that without proper asset management, mishaps like unplanned downtime, emergency breakdowns, and reactive maintenance policies can occur. This can shorten the asset life cycle and ultimately cost your business valuable time and money.
Therefore, the ultimate goal is to extend asset life, decrease unplanned downtime, and streamline asset inventory. All of the above are offered by a robust EAM that brings the required asset data and documentation to move from reactive maintenance to preventive maintenance.
In practice, an EAM tracks asset history with corresponding maintenance history, which means that companies can analyze asset data and use it to make appropriate improvements.
Such centralized access to information like asset manufacturer, recent maintenance requests, warranty details, purchase date, and asset location helps identify trends that are used to shift to more proactive maintenance strategies.
Simply put, accessible asset documentation put forth by an EAM speeds up the repair process and at the same time, promotes safe and proper asset maintenance.
Work Order Management
Enterprise Asset Management solutions give administrators and technicians the data, structure, and communication needed to quickly diagnose issues, schedule work orders, assign technicians, and keep tabs on oncoming work.
This complex and somewhat daunting task is achieved by tracking big-picture metrics like order histories, inventory costs, and usage statistics. Features that keep track of every spare part, including important details like availability and purchase date, aid facilities in the efficient management of work orders.
EAM software facilitates better resource scheduling and enables faster repair time, thereby proving effective for both reactive and preventive maintenance requests.
Labor Management
One of the more important components of responsible asset management is overseeing the training, assessment, and certification of your contractors and employees.
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Asset Management software comes up with straightforward and easily accessible safety requirements for every job and allows those in charge to track safety training. It also helps labor management by simplifying audit logs and by simply making safety procedures more accessible.
Another way in which EAM helps organizations in effectively managing labor is by allowing them to centrally manage both planned and unplanned work, all the way from the initial request through to the final completion.
Analytical Insights
In an increasingly digital world, data is piling up at an exponential pace. Data Scientists and Data Engineers are sifting through mammoth amounts of data to pull out significant patterns and predict future trends.
And in the aftermath of this data-driven economy, it would not be outrageous to state that if your facility cannot effectively access, collect, analyze and apply your equipment data, your collective operations are bound to be inefficient and under-productive in the long run.
EAM software helps extract meaningful data, draw actionable insights, and eventually, pinpoint preventive maintenance needs to regulate the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This extensive reporting and analytics feature of an EAM consistently tracks equipment usage and performance.
It generates real-time customized reports for events such as asset downtime or cost of inventory, answering key maintenance operations questions at all times.
Asset management software also forms a connecting grid with other relevant systems across the organization so that your maintenance data is in-sync and accessible to all departments and individuals.
Vendor and Knowledge Management
The typical Facility management software solutions go way beyond just providing system access to vendors. They also enable vendor management by tracking key information like activity history and certificates of insurance (COIs).
In ideal scenarios, they may also include additional functionalities which shall create a rating system, requiring stakeholders to complete performance surveys in order to develop a preferred vendor list.
Another major benefit of incorporating asset management software into the workflow is having a centralized database containing all information related to your facility’s operations.
This enables the entire group of professionals to access vital documentation about particular assets and facility maintenance procedures by virtue of knowledge management within the EAM. Cognizance of the asset’s past and maintenance patterns improves the quality of work from your team.
A comprehensively built EAM can host all the information about all the physical assets of the establishment in one single system, including warranty records, life cycle costs, audit trails, energy usage, and of course, repairs histories. Needless to say that this information is accessible to all the relevant department personnel.
Conclusion
Simply by ensuring that the high-value assets function in an orderly fashion, EAM minimizes both risks and costs and optimizes business value. Moreover, analytics provided by the software can help identify trends and opportunities to reallocate equipment inside a plant in order to bolster new avenues of business.
While the asset registry makes up for a large part of EAM, maintenance planning and scheduling is also a heavily used component. Through this, EAM software users keep track of available personnel and their corresponding skillsets, issue work orders for maintenance requests, record work hours, and regulate payments.
It should also be noted that EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) and CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) are both umbrella terms indicating the best preventive maintenance software for the management of assets and equipment. However, CMMS starts tracking after an asset is purchased & installed, while EAM tracks the whole asset life cycle right from the procurement stage.
And when it comes to asset management, EAM is relatively more focused and has more functionalities than CMMS.
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