Investing in Enterprise Assets? Tips to Select an EAM Solution for Your Organization
I recently shared a blog post entitled “How an Enterprise Asset Management Solution Can Help Improve Your Bottom Line” providing insight for organizations looking to improve the tracking and maintenance of expensive enterprise assets.
The information is useful for teams looking to better manage assets like plant equipment, shop floor machinery, materials handling equipment and other costly, intelligent machines critical to production and operations.
The topic of EAM has come up in recent ERP selection projects with our clients. This post outlines information that helps those teams seeking to select an EAM solution for their specific organizations.
Which Organizations Should Select an EAM Solution?
An increasing number of industries in the manufacturing and distribution sectors are evaluating whether to select an EAM solution to manage complex and costly equipment now in use, or that they plan to purchase in the upcoming year.
Manufacturing companies in automotive, aerospace, electronics and other sectors seek to better utilize shop floor machinery, complex tooling and material handling equipment that they rely on for daily operations.
Distribution companies often maintain fleets of trucks and/or conveyer systems and fork lift trucks, thus EAM solutions help optimize the management of these assets.
Tracking the usage and location of assets is vital to maintaining resource management visibility.
Thus, more project-oriented sales assets are becoming mobile and add significant value to the success of a customer driven project. Tracking the usage and location of these assets is vital to maintaining resource management visibility.
As we go through a business process review with our clients, we also see industrial equipment distributors looking to select an EAM solution to manage after-sale service of installed equipment at customer sites enabling them to expand their value-added services.
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Tips to Select an EAM Solution for Your Organization
No matter the scenario, Ultra’s independent ERP consultant team often advises our clients to be strategic about improving the process of managing complex assembly and automation equipment and other machinery now in use on the shop floor.
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.
Noted here are some of the more significant issues to keep in mind when selecting an EAM solution for your organization.
1 – Select an EAM solution that fully tracks all assets, throughout the full lifecycle: As we’ve noted, an automated solution must track equipment, from production and material handling equipment like cranes, lifts and conveyers, to complex tooling and assembly, to vehicles and other equipment that support the operation.
The system must offer integrated features that track the full lifecycle – from acquisition to disposal.
This includes all activities relating to the acquisition and maintenance of all operational assets and equipment within the organization.
2 – Select an EAM solution that integrates with ERP: Ensure that the solution is, or can be, integrated with the operational ERP system to capture asset utilization and maintenance history.
An enterprise asset management solution is often viewed as an add-on to ERP, thus it tends to be overlooked by many companies when they evaluate new technology.
Integrated EAM with a good predictive maintenance capability can significantly help avoid serious downtime and expensive production disruption.
3 – Select and implement with all users in mind: Be sure to involve key process owners and fully understand the requirements and touch points for effective asset management.
Consider any external partners, supply chain organizatons or other resources that need EAM access as part of the extended supply chain.
4 – Select an EAM solution that offers robust functionality: Core features and functions must cover all tracking and real-time reporting of the acquisition, accounting depreciation, maintenance, repair and disposal of equipment.
Look for Business Intelligence features such as useful dashboards and intuitive reports.
Be sure the EAM solution can integrate with other enterprise systems, offers mobile accessibility and integrates with data collection devices like barcode scanners and other devices and technology such as GPS and RFID.
In addition, look for predictive analysis such as predictive maintenance tracking, and predictive capital allocation requirements.
Looking to Select an EAM Solution? Dig Deeper
Increasing investments in plant equipment and machinery improve a company’s efficiency and drive productivity improvements. It pays to track the lifecycle of these assets as effectively as possible.
Contact Ultra to see how EAM can be used to drive true business process transformation.
Jeff is the founder of Ultra Consultants, a well-known voice in the ERP consulting industry and an expert on ERP solutions for discrete and process manufacturers. Over the last 40-plus years, his companies have helped more than 2,000 organizations improve their business processes, select ERP software and implement advanced solutions.