Wondering how to champion the value of asset management software to your executive team?
It’s not always easy to convince the C-suite to invest in something they (potentially!) don’t fully understand.
Explaining those benefits of asset management software to the executive team can be a challenge. It requires clear communication and a demonstration of value that will get them over the line.
Luckily for you, there are many benefits of employing asset management software.
For starters, Asset Management Software makes the process of managing assets more streamlined and gives you the tools to track assets and costs, manage maintenance, track repairs, monitor asset location and ensure compliance.
For the executive team, the benefits of asset management software lie in having a clear understanding of the assets employed to deliver organisational objectives, the state of those assets in terms of quality and risk, and the likely future funding options.
Let’s dig a little deeper.
Understanding the Benefits of Asset Management Software
Asset management software is an important investment for businesses wanting to effectively manage risk. With options analysis, evidence-based decision management, and prioritised investments, asset management software lays everything out for asset managers and C-suite executives alike.
Taking that one step further, an asset management information system (AMIS) like SPM Assets, is more strategic than operational, and provides added value in terms of analysis and planning.
This kind of advanced asset management software captures the data and information aligned with business needs, applies a range of analytical models to forecast likely future scenarios, and then applies levels of service, policies and standards to plan work programs, funding requirements, and budgets.
This gives you future foresight as well as comprehensive evidence based justification for investment decisions..
Here are some of the key benefits of AM software:
- Supports business outcomes and strategies
They enable a business to understand how assets support or contribute to the delivery of organisational outcomes and strategies.
- Provides education on risks
They help stakeholders understand the asset specific risks, the potential impacts - positive and negative - to strategy delivery, and the mitigation options.
- Allows for data-driven reporting and planning
They enable businesses to move towards an evidence-based, whole-of-life approach to reporting, decision making, and planning.
- Aids future funding and investment decisions
The software provides the means to understand and explore potential options to balance service levels and the associated funding/investment requirements.
- Fully integrates with other business software and systems
With plenty of integration options, you can create a smart, connected digital ecosystem, where you can benefit from the advantages of specialist software and unique insights created through integrated data sets.
Why Should You Invest in Asset Management Software?
Asset management software pays dividends by reducing risk and increasing foresight.
AM software supports long-term business goals, such as scalability, risk management, and compliance and enables you to understand the risk profiles across all your organisation's asset.
By understanding risk - both now and in future - businesses can systematically balance investment across competing priorities. For example, deciding whether to purchase new clinical equipment or upgrade the electrical infrastructure in a building.
This makes it invaluable to companies looking to manage risk and plan for future expenditure.
Aligning with Business Goals
Asset management software should be aligned with the organisation’s strategic objectives and strategies, such as service delivery models, demand forecasting and management, resilience, and sustainable investment.
It supports data-driven decision-making to inform long-term planning by providing asset lifecycle information in terms of performance, cost and utilisation.
With a more complete understanding of your organisation’s asset portfolios, you’ll be able to make more informed predictions and decisions, particularly in resource constrained environments with competing priorities.
Enhancing Risk Management and Compliance
Asset management software mitigates risks related to asset performance and failure, health and safety, and regulatory compliance.
The software can help the organisation monitor assets to ensure they remain compliant with legislation and regulations. It also allows management and monitoring of the trade-off between service levels and whole-of-life cost, while reducing the risk of costly operational disruptions and failures.
Should You Pay for Asset Management Software? Evaluating the Investment
The question on every executive's lips…
Is it worth the investment?
The true cost comparison is between a software management system and the value of the assets under management, the annual cost of operations and maintenance, and ultimately the cost of unplanned asset failure.
When things go wrong, the financial, reputational, and disruption costs can be insurmountable. When assets fail at critical times, organisations are often forced to pay a premium to replace those assets under urgency.
This is really what executives need to consider when assessing whether asset management software is worth the investment.
Consider your critical assets, and the cost to replace them under urgency against the cost of implementing and maintaining asset management software..
Use Case 1: Building Maintenance
Building managers are responsible for ensuring that all systems within a building, such as HVAC, lighting, elevators, and plumbing, are functioning efficiently and remain in compliance with regulations.
This can bring a whole host of challenges, as asset managers struggle to track and manage every aspect of the systems in their buildings. As organisations scale and develop, it becomes even more challenging to stay on top of building asset data through the life of the building . This not only leads to potential under investment in maintenance and renewal, but also to non-compliance. Consider the risk of Legionnaires' disease, failure of lifts in retirement villages, or failure of passive fire protection.
Use Case 2: Hospital Environments
Within the public hospital environment, ageing infrastructure and buildings that don’t support the modern method of health service delivery are common. In these buildings, not only do you need to care for the HVAC, lighting, elevators and plumbing, you need to ensure:
- you have the correct buildings in the correct location, performing to minimum health standards, e.g. infection control.
- facilities infrastructure is of the correct standard and has the correct capacity, and is sufficiently resilient.
- you have clinical equipment to support modern health service delivery and models of care.
- you maintain accurate registers of critical assets, including those that require regular testing and calibration.
This can be hugely challenging to manage without an established and mature asset management system in place.
Asset management software: The solution
Asset management software enables building asset managers to centralise the tracking and management of all asset data and information to provide consistency of approach and applications, and access across the organisation.
Through integration, asset management software uses and supports operational and transactional data, and supports financial reporting and analysis.
Examples include the use of:
- reactive maintenance information to determine the timing of asset upgrade or requirements
- reactive maintenance information to inform planned and proactive maintenance development and scheduling
- asset information to trigger maintenance requests and compliance inspections
- asset information and forecasts to identify and scope future maintenance and renewal programs, and the information to prioritise against competing priorities
- asset information to inform scenario modelling, options analysis, and investment prioritisation.
- asset information to inform risk reporting and monitoring – from operational to strategic, including to the board.
Making the Case for Asset Management Software
Asset management software has so many benefits. It’s important for executive teams and boards to fully understand what they're not aware of or missing without accurate asset information managed robustly within a centralised asset management system..
Here are some of the key wins when you invest in asset management software:
- Asset management software provides a register of all assets and supporting lifecycle information for reporting, analysis, and decision making. This reduces risk, makes it easier to make decisions and gives whole-of-life analysis that is otherwise judgement based.
- This whole-of-life cost analysis is made possible by robust documentation and understanding of asset lifecycle costs, through design, construction, commissioning, operation, maintenance, renewal, upgrading and more.
- With added data, organisations can forecast asset renewal profiles – understanding likely investment requirements for assets using lifecycle analytics, service levels, policies and standards.
- With scenario modelling and options analysis also available, asset managers can understand the options available, and explore trade-offs between service delivery and funding requirements.
- Asset management software enables you to create a program of work based on lifecycle requirements, funding, and established delivery methods.
- With risk management reporting, monitoring and planned mitigation, your asset managers will have the evidence on hand to make data-driven decisions that rely less on their judgement and opinion.
Want to learn more? Request a demo today.
Did you know your business could start benefiting from asset management software straight away?
With our API integrations, you can integrate existing systems into the SPM Assets software easily and quickly, allowing you to reap all the benefits of your new software.
If you have questions, why not contact us now to learn more about our asset management software and request a demo.