New Trends in Asset Management: Why Traditional Models Are Now Outdated

Asset management is any system within a business that catalogs, tracks, maintains, and disposes of that company’s valuables. These assets can be either physical, such as office computers and construction equipment, or abstract, such as financial information and employees’ intellectual property.

Asset management is not a new corporate practice. For centuries, business owners across all different types of industries, from shipping to textiles, kept track of their company products, resources, and needs with pen-and-paper ledgers. With the invention of computers, asset management moved to the digital space, with businesses manually entering assets into spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel or purchasing asset management software to handle these processes.

Asset management has always been important for smooth operations within a business. When a proper asset management system is set up, your company could benefit in many different ways. For example, tracking assets helps improve workflow and productivity, record losses in the event of a natural disaster, reduce employee theft, eliminate the occurrence of lost or misplaced assets (otherwise known as ghost assets), and enable more efficient planning and organizing within your company.

Individually, these benefits are obvious but favorable outcomes of an asset tracking system. However, it’s when the sum of these parts are combined that the true advantage of asset management is revealed. The primary reason why solidly-implemented asset management is more important than ever is that it can positively impact your business’s bottom line. And in this fast-paced, technological age, asset tracking could be the difference between your company thriving or sinking.

Asset management is a vital strategy for improving company revenue for several reasons. First, asset tracking streamlines your operations and reduces time wasted on inefficient tracking methods, such as manually entering assets in a spreadsheet or letting only a handful of individuals deal with assets (which can lead to oversights and discrepancies). Savvy businesses are realizing how much they have to lose in terms of productivity if they don’t update the way they handle assets by moving away from solutions which are quickly becoming not only obsolete, but costly due to their drain on company time.