Last year we brought up a very important point when managing supply. Specifically, we reminded you that sometimes supply comes from within the four (virtual) walls of your business — a fact that is often overlooked by man BoB (Best-of-Breed) S2P (Source-to-Pay) modules and even suites.

When we are talking about MRO, the goods and services you need might be in a storage room in another building. If we are talking about consumables, like what you might need for a new hire, everything you need might be one floor down, left behind by another hire who, after the probation period, didn’t work out. As a result, inventory and asset management are key to successful Supply Management, and to successful Procurement.

But Asset Management is more than just keeping track of assets, moving them from one location to another, and making sure employees choose existing assets in inventory before ordering new assets from suppliers.

Asset Management is not just tracking assets and deploying them when they are needed, it is making sure they are used when they are usable. Assets have a value, a value that almost always depreciates when they are not used. Add this to the extra cost of having them in inventory, and that’s a lot of wasted capital.

In other words, good asset management requires a platform that can

• track and improve forecasts … especially if demand or utilization timeframes start to shift
• optimally manage inventory levels … there should be enough to last to the next, optimal, restock window with a bit of buffer, but not so much that the excess inventory grows at every restock
• re-assign internal assets that should be utilized as fast as possible, and even allow for internal upgrades to delay unnecessary spending (e.g. the new machine bought for a new hire that didn’t work out after 3 months should be reassigned to an engineer 3 months away from a hardware upgrade)
• manage leasing of assets that are going to go unused for a while (e.g. the organization has an expensive piece of construction equipment that it will not use for the next three months — lease it out)
• identify when extra inventory or newly retired assets should be sold off to minimize loss

… or at least integrate with a platform that does.

Asset management is frequently overlooked, but very important to successful supply management.