How an Enterprise Asset Management Solution Can Help Improve Your Bottom Line

Advances in assembly, production and shop floor equipment continue to impact today’s manufacturing and distribution organizations.

These types of equipment improve a company’s efficiency and drive productivity improvements.

Many of the companies Ultra’s independent ERP consultant team speaks with are investing in innovative, more intelligent assembly and automation equipment and other machinery.

With these investments comes a more complex process to manage acquisition, tracking, maintenance, repair and disposal of the equipment.

That’s where an Enterprise Asset Management solution adds value.

Enterprise Asset Management Solution Defined

An Enterprise Asset Management solution (EAM) sometimes referred to as a Capital Asset Management solution, helps teams manage sophisticated equipment deployed in their operations.

These solutions are often integrated with ERP systems and are typically a modular set of applications that manage the acquisition, accounting depreciation, maintenance, repair and disposal of equipment.

Equipment can be everything from production and material handling devices like cranes, lifts and conveyers, to complex tooling and assembly, to vehicles and other equipment that support the operation.

How Do Today’s Companies Track Their Assets?

We find that companies use a mix of automated, manual and paper-based methods to track assets.

As an example, many companies utilize a fixed asset accounting package to track the financial depreciation and cost capture associated with capital assets – while maintaining spreadsheets covering service schedules and maintenance plans.

Others may have a “stand-alone” maintenance management solution that tracks repair and preventative maintenance schedules.

Many companies still rely on paper-based work orders for maintenance and parts usage reporting – which results in inefficiencies in managing the maintenance operations and increases the response time for dealing with system downtimes and production delays.

Benefits of Implementing an Enterprise Asset Management Solution

As we’ve seen as we guide teams through ERP selection, tracking and maintaining expensive assets is becoming more critical, as investment in intelligent machinery continues to rise.

A benefit of implementing an automated EAM solution is cutting plant and equipment downtime, which causes delays in the production schedule.

An automated enterprise asset management solution takes away the burden of manually tracking service and maintenance, while increasing asset visibility, increasing safety, and enabling maintenance teams to predict potential downtime events, instead of reacting to them after the fact — these solutions enable enterprises to work more effectively when it comes to equipment maintenance.

By reducing the chance of equipment downtime, the company helps improve its bottom line by improving quality and delivery performance to its customers.

Additional benefits of implementing an enterprise asset management solution include:

• Increased visibility of assets inside and outside of the operation
• Better cost control for maintenance and repair
• Better predictive and preventative maintenance procedures to reduce downtime and outages
• Reduced capital expenditures
• Increased capacity utilization / throughput
• Improved product quality and consistency
• Reduced spares inventory and carrying costs
• Increased manufacturing facility flexibility
• Reduced order cycle time
• Increased direct and MRO labor productivity
• Improved warranty tracking

Enterprise Asset Management Solution – Learn More

It’s a new chapter for manufacturers and distributors, given the increasing investments being made in plant equipment and machinery.

Forward-looking companies are evaluating how enterprise systems such as EAM can be used to drive true business process transformation.

Contact Ultra to consider your strategies in the face of this new business environment.