Assets are the backbone of every organization. The machinery, tools, fleet, and facilities keep the organization running smoothly. Now, since physical assets are so important, it is essential to keep them running in the best condition at all times.
Managing the physical assets manually is a tiring task and highly prone to errors, especially when tracking maintenance schedules and asset performance without proper tools. In such situations, investing in the ideal enterprise asset management software will ensure that your asset health is closely monitored and technical problems are resolved before they cause unplanned downtime. But how do you choose the right enterprise asset management tool? We will discuss it in the article below.
Why Do Enterprises Need to Invest in an EAM?
Have a look at your facility or plant. Beyond the pipelines, cabling, and other things, do you see a range of machinery, tools, and equipment? What about the fleets of vehicles and buildings? Are you finding difficulty scheduling maintenance tasks and managing them?
You need an approach or tool to make managing and maintaining physical assets in your organization easier. The enterprise asset management software tool manages the activities of the assets throughout their lifecycle. This means that starting from the initial planning and acquisition to its final disposition, it tracks every activity. But how to choose the right EAM?
9 Key EAM Features to Look For
Let us look at the key features that an EAM must have.
- Asset Hierarchy:
Your EAM must help you establish asset hierarchy in your organization. It must allow you to import the asset hierarchy spreadsheet and other information and integrate it into the software.
Asset hierarchy is essential to establish asset criticality. It enables you to understand their condition and location and categorize them systematically. You can understand the cost of the assets at all levels and focus on maintenance operations at different stages.
- Asset Lifecycle Management:
Asset lifecycle management is the foundation of an EAM. Assets go through various stages, starting from their initial planning and acquisition to their deployment and monitoring, and finally their retirement. Asset lifecycle management helps with the following:
- Determine whether purchasing new assets is economically viable.
- Track the total cost of asset acquisition.
- Deploy assets safely.
- Monitor the assets constantly to ensure they are running in optimal conditions.
- Ensure they are finally disposed of responsibly.
- Work Order Management
The EAM must help you manage your work orders seamlessly. This helps improve your organization’s productivity, decision-making process, and schedule and complete maintenance tasks seamlessly.
When an EAM has a good order management module, it allows the maintenance team to report work order statuses and view them in real time. It enables you to keep track of the consumed inventory and spare parts so that you remain stocked up at all times.
- Financial Planning and Cost Control:
The right EAM will make financial planning and cost control easy. Organizations can track the total cost of running the assets at the facility level, component level, and even sub-asset level. This information enables them to make sound financial decisions. For example, most often, stakeholders are confused between “repair” and “replacement” of a particular asset. An EAM must ensure that these decisions are backed by data.
- Preventive and Predictive Maintenance:
Preventive and predictive maintenance is the lifeline of an organization that runs smoothly and experiences zero downtime. The EAM tool must help schedule maintenance tasks before they cause unexpected failure, leading to bottlenecks and downtime. It must also integrate AI capabilities and IoT to predict failures that are likely to occur, empowering proactive measures.
- Planning:
Automating the process of work order planning is another essential feature that the EAM must have. The EAM must utilize different parameters, thresholds, and resources to plan work orders. It must take into account the criticality of the tasks and the availability of tools to prioritize them.
- Efficient Resource Allocation:
Resource allocation may feel like a minor aspect of asset management. But the truth is that without the right resources, you won’t be able to carry out the maintenance tasks efficiently. With efficient resource allocation features, the maintenance team can utilize the resources cleverly.
- Track Maintenance KPIs:
The key performance indicators drive maintenance tasks based on the organization’s larger goals. The EAM must also help them track KPIs, allowing them to have complete visibility into the progress of the maintenance tasks. Along with the KPIs, it should also provide data about asset history, failure, cost, and runtime. This will give a perspective on how to carry out the maintenance tasks.
Conclusion
The right EAM tool enables organizations to have complete visibility and control over the assets throughout their entire lifecycle. It allows them to track the usage of assets and make informed decisions. When viewed from a broader perspective, EAM software should help minimize equipment downtime and improve cost control.
