Starting with the basics for asset management success
Written by Steve Beber – CEO at ASSETSPIRE
In a fast-paced world where time is the real currency, every business leader is looking to be more efficient and manage staff’s time effectively to drive value within a business, maintaining a good work/life balance.
Technology is at the heart of change and this poses its own problems with scalability, uptime, risk management, servicing/maintenance/repair/replace and the ever growing need to be using the latest and greatest cutting-edge platforms.
Companies of all sizes deploy various software and hardware-based products to help gather intelligence and mitigate risk through proactive alerting, predictive failure monitoring and general change management solutions to track all moves, adds, change and planned preventative maintenance regimes.
The data centre industry is at the leading edge of technology, adapting to new technologies quickly to deliver faster, more efficient and reliable processing as the foundation for business solutions.
Over the past 15 years various enterprise solutions have spawned like DCIM (data centre infrastructure management tools), CAFM solutions (computer aided facilities management solutions) and many other acronym solutions like ITAM, ITSM, CMDB’s and so on.
At the heart of all these solutions, the foundation of these and fundamental starting block should almost certainly have been asset management. You can’t manage, plan or maintain assets if you don’t know what they are, where they are, their condition and all relevant details around service schedules and maintenance.
The importance of accurate asset management is often overlooked with many companies being blinded by glitzy tech with 3D walk throughs and dynamic dashboards that all look fantastic in PowerPoint and product videos but operationally have very little value, especially when you’re using inaccurate data.
The old saying that still exists today: put bad data in, get bad data out..
In 20 + years of working in the data centre and facilities management space, I have never come across a company that truly has accurate asset management data that they are willing to wager a bet on the accuracy. I have worked with some of the largest firms in financial services, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, property & facilities managers and some of the biggest data centres across the world and fundamentally the one problem I continue to see if the lack of accurate data to plan and manage capacity from.
Forget bells & whistles, go back to basics. I always say, you wouldn’t build a house starting with the roof, you need a solid foundation. As like DCIM, CAFM and any of these industry solutions accurate asset management needs to be the starting point and fundamental foundation to drive success. Close second to this is having a simple, intuitive process to collect and maintain accurate data to ensure once you have your baseline, recording the change process is simple and efficient.
Once you have accurate asset data and a robust process to maintain accurate data, then you can start integrating your intelligent monitoring, alerting and predictive failure warning systems to really drive business intelligence. In the data centre sector, integrating building management systems, power monitoring, temperature sensors and many other solutions can truly help you build a smart eco system to help capacity plan and operationally manage your data centres.
In the facilities space we are seeing the exact trends repeating themselves with the adoption of smart building technologies.
There are many great new smart technologies being designed and implemented into everyday buildings to help improve efficiencies in utility and space utilisation. The same problem exists in this space as has done in the data centre space for many years, many of these solutions are siloed and accessed through stand alone vendor platforms. Imagine having accurate asset data for your buildings and overlaying the intelligence of smart technologies to give you a real picture of what is going on, now all of a sudden you have true visibility and risk management in one place.
The advice is, start with an asset management platform that is intuitive and simple to update and maintain. Layer on your intelligence from existing solutions or add new solutions to bring intelligence to your sites. Contact me for information around our cloud-based asset management platform and how we can help you on your journey to accurate data and truly knowing where your risks lie. Steve.beber@assetspire.co.uk
Steve Beber is the CEO of ASSETSPIRE, a cloud-based asset management platform. https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-beber-0682244/