10 Game Changing Benefits of Asset Management Software

The biggest challenge Asset Servicing businesses face is often how to manage their schedules and more service businesses are turning to Asset Management Software to meet expectations.

The responsibility of maintaining your client’s asset register can be challenging. You need to ensure all assets that require servicing are booked into your schedule and your team is available at that time.

Carrying out a cost effective planned maintenance schedule also creates a lot of admin. That’s why more and more Field Service businesses are looking for ways to create a more streamlined process.

Who uses Asset Management Software?

Asset Management Software is used across numerous industries. It is especially useful when supporting the planned maintenance of these categories of assets:

• Fixed Assets
   These are assets such as Electrical Sub-Stations, Turbines, Telecoms and Water Refinery Equipment. These require regular maintenance and servicing to ensure they are safe for the public and operate at peak performance.
• Linear Assets
   These assets are part of infrastructure and include things such as railway tracks, pipelines for gas, sewage, drainage, or power lines.
• Mobile Assets
   Assets that may change location such as trucks, transformers, some power generators, charging stations and rail cars.

The added insight and data captured by using Field Service Software is helping service businesses prioritise the maintenance schedules of assets most likely to fail.

Over half of Field Service businesses use software for Asset Management

Over 40% of Field Service businesses use Job Management Software or Asset Management Software to help them organise teams more effectively.

There are numerous benefits to moving your client information, job details and field service finances from filing cabinets or multiple platforms to a single Asset Management Software platform.

Here’s 10 game changing benefits of moving your service businesses into the 21st Century.

1. Never miss a service

Keeping on top of assets that are next due a service can be a challenging task. Worse still you could be using a system where you rely on the customer to inform you when you need to service their equipment.

This can quickly lead to bottlenecks and added strain on your team as they struggle to meet deadlines.

Service businesses who use Asset Management Software can input the frequency at which each individual asset requires servicing. They can also set up reminders for both their team and the client so you never miss a service again.

Avoiding congestion and anticipating upcoming services also ensures your client’s assets remain compliant and operational. Downtime for assets that cannot be used for compliance reasons when they haven’t been services can prove costly for your customers.

Using Asset Management Software help you gain complete visibility of your work load and what’s coming up.

2. Visibility of where your team is currently working

Where is your team right now?

When you use Asset Management Software with GPS tracking you can see exactly where your team is working and who might be available should you receive an unexpected call out. Should you get a no-show from the client you can quickly re-route the engineer to the nearest available job.

Location tracking features are a great way to ensure your client remains happy and you can get the most productivity out of each team member.

3. Save time when looking for job details

If gathering job details, asset registers or billing information takes you any more than a few minutes to pull together then you need to make a change in your processes.

Asset Management Software provides your management team and those in the field with a single source of information and an easy way to retrieve what they need in real time.

Email attachments, outlook calendar invites, quotes, invoices and asset registers can be chore to pull together into one place when you set up a job.

Why not start by putting them all into one platform?

The average Field Service professional spends around 5 to 6 hours on admin 

When you use a single all in one platform for Asset Management you can ensure your team spends their time more productively.

4. No more email tennis with your customers

The modern customer expects to see what’s happening with their jobs in real-time.

Live updates, automatic notifications, SMS and Email communications are now the minimum expectations, but how do you manage that?

Asset Management Software give you a chance to provide an automated ‘Uber-like’ experience for your customers.

Automated SMS and Email communications allows for hands-free management of your communication leaving you to carry on completing jobs, knowing your customer has everything they need.

Asset Management Software reduces the amount of times you’re interrupted throughout your day with customer requests or questions. It provides a modern solution to improve communication and limits the need for interruptions.

5. A better managed asset life cycle

A well managed Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM) schedule will ensure that your clients assets operate at their expected peak performance for a longer life cycle.

Frequent breakdowns and poor maintenance can significantly reduce the performance of their assets and in some cases render them unusable.

Meeting minimal standards for specific regulations and compliance is a major concern for a lot of businesses. They rely on their service partners to ensure their equipment continues to meet these standards.

Asset Management Software helps your team manage a PPM schedule by simplifying the process of adding an asset to a register and scheduling routine maintenance visits.

PPM schedules help anticipate breakdowns and managing a structured maintenance plan will help your team spot faults early.

To learn more about the benefits of PPM Schedule click here: What is a PPM Schedule?

6. Provide insight to your customer on whether to buy new equipment

Having a better picture of the condition and service history of a client’s asset can help your team make decisions over whether to upgrade or replace equipment.

Buying new equipment such as HVAC units, Water Treatment Tanks or Electrical Systems can be very costly for your customer. Replacing any asset you are responsible for shouldn’t be taken lightly, but with Asset Management Software, you can make a more informed decision.

By using Asset Management Software while documenting services and repairs, your team are able to provide supporting evidence when suggesting the replacement of parts or in extreme cases, upgrading equipment.

If your businesses services and sells new equipment this can help both sides of your businesses.

How Deva Medical use Asset Management Software to provide better advice for their customers

Deva Medical provide a maintenance service for bio-medical equipment. They visit hospitals and clinic to ensure their equipment is operating in peak condition and they use Asset Management Software to schedule and complete the jobs.

They are able to offer insight to their customers on the condition of the assets because all the service records are stored in a single place that’s easy for their team to access and report on.

Here’s Sarah Betteley explaining how they use the software to provide a better experience for their customers:

7. Put a client report together in minutes

To pull together the details for a customer report including, the service history, notes from the engineers or technicians and supporting information such as photos or documents could take hours without Asset Management Software.

When you have everything to hand and inputted into one platform you can easily produce reports for your customers.

PDF builders, included in some Asset Management Software platforms, will help you display exactly the information you wish to include and once these reports are complete, they can be sent via email straight from the platform.

This means you are able to produce, great looking informative reports for your customers in minutes rather than hours.

8. No more list paperwork

The day of triplicate forms and paper based job sheets are long over. Today, everything is done on apps and software.

Mobile Forms that are completed on smart phones have shepherded in a new era for Field Service Engineers. It has allowed them to complete more on the go, take pictures and include them in reports instantly and sync all the job details back with the team in the office in real time.

A paperless, digital, Field Service operation is one without lost paperwork which can lead to delays in completed jobs and issues with cashflow.

9. Future proof your Field Service business

The direction of travel for service businesses is a more connected experience for your team and your customer.

Without adopting Asset Management Software into your business you may struggle to keep up with the demands of your customer and the progression of your competition.

Introducing Cloud Based Software to your business that streamlines your operation will future proof it for later.

10. It’s easy to get started (in most cases!)

Adding new software to a business used to be a big undertaking.

It would take a team of people to implement and often months of development ahead of time to make sure it aligned with your business.

Things have moved on quite a bit since those days and new Asset Management Software providers such as Klipboard, offer Free Trials, demonstrations and the assurance you can be up and running in minutes.

This type of software is much more accessible now. Although, you may find some providers still requiring lengthly integration and even charge set up fees.

Do your research before finding a software provider. Make sure they can seamlessly link to your businesses and ask the right questions up front, it will save you a lot of time later.

We’ve put together a guide which you can read here on the 5 things to do before starting a Free Trial.