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Asset Management is a Process Every Business Can Use to Save Money and Improve Productivity
Part 2 of 4
Signs, Symptoms and Effects of Poor Asset Management
Poor asset management leads to poor data quality - and poor data quality can negatively affect the business over time. In fact, experience shows that there are a number of common causes that can lead to poor asset management, including lack of business controls for managing and/or updating asset data, lack of ownership for asset data quality, and an out-of-balance investment in people, process, data and technology. In addition, some businesses may not consider asset management to be a critical function, focusing on audits only, while others may not consider asset data to be an important component of the business's intellectual property.
The primary symptoms of poor asset management are also fairly ubiquitous, and may include anything from numerous compliance and security issues, to uncontrollable capital and/or expense budgets, excessive network downtime and poor performance, under- or over-utilized assets, incompatible software applications, increasing operational costs and headcount, and non-matching asset data derived from different organizations and/or business systems.
Moreover, poor ongoing asset management practices can impact a business by degrading customer service delivery, polluting the existing installed base of data and distracting sales resources with customer data issues For example, Service Delivery may be impaired by inaccurate depot sparing creating customer entilement issues, increasing escalations to upper management and lowering customer satisfaction. An uncertain installed base lengthens contract renewal cycle-time, limits revenue opportunities and inhibits technology refresh planning.
The result of poor asset management can ultimately be devastating to a business, often leading to one or more of the following negative impacts: - Increased Asset Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- Decreased workforce productivity
- Increased non-compliance issues
- Decreased Customer Satisfaction
- Lower Return-on-Investment (ROI) on capital investments
- Decreased network/business performance
- Increased number of internal and external audits
The causes of poor asset management can be many, the symptoms pervasive, and the results devastating. However, the good news is that there are specific solutions available that can help any organization avoid these pitfalls. Next Month - Part 3 of 4 - The PETRO Asset Management Process |
