Every organisation typically has thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of assets.
These assets range from plant equipment to containers, from desktop PCs to field engineers' tools, and from photographic libraries to corporate literature.
The task of managing them and keeping track of their lifecycles and depreciation for accounting and management purposes has moved over the years from a labour-intensive manual process to one aided and simplified by technology. Now, however, asset management is set to be transformed into a process that pundits call enterprise asset management (EAM).
EAM is not a single technology but a combination of several.
Fundamental to the process is the use of the Internet to link equipment. EAM can use embedded chips, scanners, barcodes, monitoring software and wireless technology to automate the asset management process and generate far more useful management information than has previously been available.
Ultimately, EAM is designed to reduce corporate administration costs by reducing the manpower and expertise needed to control assets.
