The Need for Asset Management
Asset management, both fixed and IT, has become a critical management requirement. This is not only for large organizations, but small and medium (SMB) sized businesses as well.
Traditionally, organisations have tracked their assets using a combination of available tools such as spreadsheets and other lists, which has meant no or limited asset visibility. Lack of visibility means that organizations are not able to manage the critical assets on which the business depends to operate and therefore generate its revenue. Poor visibility also means Assets cannot be quickly located if there is no system to manage and track assets and therefore customers’ needs, and hence customer satisfaction levels, are not met.
New Regulatory Requirements
Added to this critical operational need for asset management, changes to the way in which all organisations are required to prepare their financial accounts, catalysed by the failure of some major global organisations such as Enron and Worldcom, means that proper and thorough asset management is now mandatory.
The new regulatory reporting requirements, only some of which appear below, include:
- CLERP9
- Sarbanes Oxley (Sarbox)
- International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)
- Corporate Governance Standards.
These standards have resulted in a focus on the quality of the data supporting financial reporting, especially in relation to a company’s fixed assets since they are a substantial component of the balance sheet.
The Problem Today
The problem to date for asset, financial and executive layer managers such as CFO’s, has been the availability of an affordable, easy to use, out of the box solution, yet one that is feature rich and scalable to suit companies with as few as 200 or 200,000 or more assets. Smartpath's Loc8 asset management product provides this much needed business solution.
