Your construction industry business depends upon its physical assets to complete jobs quickly and efficiently. Visibility around the current status of every piece of construction equipment and material owned by the organization can help in several ways, enabling greater efficiency in the use and allocation of those assets.
If your resource management solutions are still largely based on legacy technologies, such as offline spreadsheets or paper documents, it can be difficult to move with adequate speed and accuracy, or to link inventory data to other essential systems, such as accounting and project management. Fortunately, modernized inventory management tools are available as part of enterprise resource management platforms purpose-built for the construction industry.
The Importance of Asset Management in Construction
Assets play an outsized role in determining the productivity of your construction organization. The availability of equipment will determine the timeline for projects, while effective storage and preventative maintenance of these assets has a major effect on budget. The whole process of job costing and billing is tied to the expense of using assets – the more clearly you understand the status of each piece of equipment and material, the more accurately you can complete these essential financial activities.
If your business is a self-performing contractor, whether you are a specialty contractor, a heavy/civil contractor or a general contractor with field crews, inventory management is especially important. Everyday work performance and job completion is closely associated with requisitioning, deploying and maintaining assets. Keeping a real-time eye on proceedings can help you maintain low overhead while delivering results, which is the crux of job profitability.
If you can enable accurate profit and loss calculations through equipment P&L reporting tools, you are able to factor in essential financial data when making choices about renting, buying and repairing assets. Furthermore, when your inventory management system is advanced enough to enable flexible billing, you can move proactively to turn a profit on operating your equipment, rather than just managing the costs of keeping it.
Of course, these asset management processes are innately tied to the other parts of organizational management. This is why it pays to update your asset management solution as part of an unified database platform for your organization, rather than a one-off piece of software that will have to be integrated into a multi-vendor landscape.
A Modern Approach to Construction Asset Management
Rather than treating asset management as a separate piece of software, it’s important to consider the solution’s close relationship with the other capabilities your organization relies on to organize its data and workflows. When you add construction asset management as part of a unified construction platform – instead of a discrete piece of on-premise software, you gain access to seamless process integration.
Your asset and inventory management actions are intimately tied to other processes within your organization, so this connection should be made explicit and automatic through modern, cloud-based software designed from the ground up for the construction industry. Purchase orders are visible to all relevant parties, and when these orders involve the addition of new capital assets, the updates to both accounting ledgers and inventory listings are made simultaneously.
This level of transparency and real-time data synchronization extends to purchasing consumable items needed for day-to-day operations. No piece of inventory is too large or small to be tracked by the asset management solution. Furthermore, when asset management is integrated directly with accounting tools as part of a single database platform, it becomes simpler to manage accounts payable and the organization’s general ledger.
The advantage of the single database platform takes several forms. First, the automatic updating across inventory and accounting prevents wasted employee time that would come from manually updating information. In addition, these real-time updates take away some of the risk that human error will invariably introduce to the equation.
The Value of an Integrated Asset Management Solution Built for Construction
Key benefits from a better approach to managing construction inventory and materials.
A greater ability to control material costs, with visibility into every aspect of asset purchasing, storage, deployment and maintenance.
A shorter procurement cycle, with many aspects of the purchasing process updated automatically for greater consistency and efficiency.
Reduced costs that would have been spent on asset maintenance with more real-time access to condition data and proactive repair schedules.
Greater return on investment from capital assets due to more operational uptime and visibility into the location and status of each piece of equipment.
Accurate projections of future material needs, which enable you to make effective supply orders and reduce costs.
Automatic posts of fixed asset charges to the general ledger, reducing inefficiency and the risk of inaccuracy.
Visibility into asset condition and location, enabling personnel to move equipment proactively and access materials where and when they are needed.
Increased ability to profit from the yard through user-defined invoicing for any and all assets.
Proactive asset assignment as part of the project planning process for current and future jobs across the organization.
The Bottom Line on Construction Asset Management
Asset management is a central function for any contractor firm and demands fully featured software solutions. To ensure such a deployment enables your business instead of adding extra complications, you should seek out a fully integrated solution purpose-built for the construction industry. This is what the Asset Management module delivers as part of the CMiC Construction Platform.
CMiC Asset Management enables you to manage your assets more accurately and intentionally, comply easily with safety standards, raise your employee accountability around equipment use and boost overall efficiency. You can track, monitor and report on the use of each asset, from large capital assets to the day-to-day consumables your team uses. It’s simple to track and maximize the return on your portfolio of construction assets.
This solution works for contractor firms of all specialties and sizes and can grow alongside your organization. As you expand and add more assets, a larger number of active construction sites, a larger budget and more employees, you won’t have to make a new software purchase – CMiC Asset Management will easily and seamlessly track the newly expanded inventory.