Article Directory :: Business - General Articles

The Spreadsheet versus Online Asset Management Software

By Daniel Stouffer

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 25Sep2010 Word count: 534 Viewed: 143 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

In today's pressurized business environment, executives must ensure that they leave no stone unturned as they strive to keep the company above water, let alone try and turn a profit. The brutal recession has ensured that every measurement metric must be carefully analyzed and every opportunity for improvement seized. The executive team will soon realize that many of the old methods are far from adequate, even though they may have been considered to be acceptable in better times.

The efficiency of the business is only as good as the combined efficiency of all of its assets. Each piece of equipment is responsible for a certain task. Traditionally, efficiency was measured in terms of performance against purpose. This metric alone is insufficient and our measurement capabilities archaic. It's high time that we consider online asset management software solutions to help us gather pertinent data in real-time.

In today's pressurized business environment, executives must ensure that they leave no stone unturned as they strive to keep the company above water, let alone try and turn a profit. The brutal recession has ensured that every measurement metric must be carefully analyzed and every opportunity for improvement seized.

Unless we are able to determine how each piece of equipment operates, we cannot hope to contain our burgeoning energy costs. For far too long, companies have relied on basic forms, such as spreadsheets, to record asset existence, maintenance issues and performance. Spreadsheets are very static tools and hardly suitable if we are to analyze pure efficiency.

Spreadsheets arrived during the 1980s and while they are now far more functional than they were then, the problems remain the same. Fundamentally, we are not able to constantly monitor asset performance in real-time, as spreadsheets are designed to record merely a "snapshot." Online asset management software solutions, on the contrary, can give us a far greater insight and a much deeper visibility into equipment efficiency.

Online asset management software can be used to monitor every piece of equipment and can relate to benchmarks to trigger warnings and alarms. If a piece of equipment is found to be using more energy, for example, the software can immediately alert and even send a message to summon the appropriate service provider. This can certainly help to avoid excessive downtime.

Many organizations have a very poor way of recording the asset inventories in their possession. The methods they use harp back to the old times and they may have numerous different systems in place. The company cannot hope to be efficient if it is not fully aware of asset inventory and online asset management systems are based on a thorough tagging and identification screen.

Energy can represent more than one third of monthly expenditure for the typical business and its cost is rising dramatically. The call for sustainability requires us to control our energy usage, at the same time as we cut back on our associated carbon emissions. In order for us to achieve this, we need to control the performance at the asset level.

Online asset management software is a far more dynamic tool when compared to the traditional Excel spreadsheet-based approach. It enables much better visibility across the enterprise and helps to eliminate confusion.

EasyPublish™ this article - publishers click here

More articles by Daniel Stouffer

Free Report!
Ten Essential Secrets Of Article Marketing ... Grab Your Free
Copy Now:

Need Content?
Regular Top Quality Content for your Blog, Ezine or Website ...
Delivered Direct,
For Free!
Click For Details