Transforming EAM and Business Outcomes Through Cloud

By Ashish Srivastava, Senior Vice President APAC, Triterras Asia

Ashish Srivastava, Senior Vice President APAC, Triterras Asia

Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) is must for every business these days. All businesses are dealing everyday with either physical or non-physical assets or both. EAM helps businesses by finding the appropriate assets for a particular job and also it helps to keep it functioning with regular maintenance alerts. EAM software maintains a record of all the assets one wishes to monitor. It is specifically designed to manage assets, contracts, purchases, and vendors. Using EAM software, a business makes an intelligent decision by analyzing if new equipment needs to be bought or just the basic inventory outlook for faster business decisions.

For any business, enterprise asset management software is of great use. The major benefit that it allows is the automation of all the processes rather than manually collecting paper trails, which in all possibilities might get lost or torn. A good mix of different hardware and software technologies with EAM can produce better results—captures information of the assets, requires minimal system training, reduces time to input information of the assets by using latest technologies like Barcode/RFID, and decreases errors in allocating the assets to a department/branch.

EAM helps to manage entire lifecycle of your asset and data intelligence gives you better productivity. Cloud-based EAM is playing an important role for small to large-scale businesses to improve the effectiveness of assets which businesses own. Major advantage with cloud based EAM is somehow similar to what cloud is offering to all segments – it’s much cheaper with minimal upfront cost, reduces implementation and integration time, and can be upgraded easily.

Cloud based EAM allows you to enjoy the bottom-line benefits of an EAM system without the IT burden. All you need is a computer with Internet access – there’s no hardware or software to install. Users have access anywhere, anytime, so you can manage maintenance and assets from any location.

Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Consists Of Asset Register, Work Order Management, and Inventory and Procurement Functions in an Integrated Business Software Package

Some advantages of choosing cloud EAM versus an on-premise EAM system include faster initial setup and implementation, greater convenience, lower hardware costs, and automatic updates.

Research clearly indicates how cloud EAM will capture 50 percent of the current EAM market by 2020. Most of the businesses are moving towards cloud and software product companies are making EAM more compatible for cloud using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model.

Additionally, EAM provides a platform for business intelligence applications focused on asset management decision support and applications that minimize the cost of support and risk of failure.

Advantages of having good cloud based EAM

The perks of having a cloud based EAM are numerous—keeping the organization’s assets and operations at optimum efficiency, accurately tracking the position and location of assets on a real time basis, auditing the assets at any point of time using the wireless handhelds. Moreover, this also includes achieving higher service levels, enabling the management to monitor all their assets through any networked PC, anytime anywhere. These results in the system to be highly scalable (tracking can be extended to staff, visitors, and stores).

Understanding your perfect EAM requirement

Diving into a new software implementation without the right mix of capabilities and delivery can spell disaster, so it’s smart to be patient. The complexity of capabilities and level of customization necessary for your cloud EAM implementation can be a hindrance.

However, there are five specific variables to evaluate when seeking a cloud-based EAM. Your approach may vary depending on whether you’re implementing a brand new EAM or replacing or upgrading from an existing one.

First is the price. Cloud-based software doesn’t carry many of the upfront costs for on-premise software, but that doesn’t mean it should be seen as “cheaper.” Depending on your budgetary constraints, your organization may favour capital expenditures over the annual operating expense common to many cloud-based systems. The second is in the support system. Small and midsize companies have fewer internal support resources, which can help explain why they’ve been quicker to adopt cloud EAM systems. Thirdly, one must take care of the challenges. One should compare the functionality between on-premise and cloud versions, as the latter are likely to have some functional limitations. This could be a deal-breaker for some companies, and it would be best to wait until a version with your required feature set is available. Next one must lay attention on the flexibility of the system. Separate from complexity, the degree of customization in a cloud-based EAM may be limited as well. If your organization simply needs the core capabilities of an out-of-the-box EAM, a cloud option should work. To conclude is the integration capacity. Most often, EAMs are integrated with financial, human resources, and procurement applications. If these integrations are required, it could prevent a multi-tenant SaaS approach, whereby the software is running in a single instance, but serves multiple people.