From manufacturing, mining and oil and gas to construction and healthcare, businesses across all verticals work with vast amounts of machines, equipment and mobile tools every day. Effective asset management has a major impact on operational productivity and companies’ bottom line, and yet this has traditionally been plagued by poor visibility into existing asset use and conditions. The application of IoT for asset management opens compelling opportunities to optimize equipment efficiency and asset lifecycle management.

Asset Management Hurdles

The old-school way of managing assets incorporates visual inspections, handwritten lists and excel sheets to track the current status, location and performance of heterogeneous equipment. Without a doubt, this approach is labor-intensive and inefficient, while failing to provide sufficient asset information. As such, employees often waste hours searching for dispersed tools and parts or make redundant supply orders, which results in substantial costs and productivity loss. Due to the lack of visibility, valuable assets are also highly susceptible to thefts and vandalism attempts.

What’s more, poor insights into actual equipment health mean that devices are often serviced too frequently or too late, and spare parts can easily run short. When it comes to mission-critical machinery, a single failure could disrupt the production line partially or even entirely, causing expensive downtime and delaying product delivery. On the other hand, redundant, scheduled-based preventive maintenance that overlooks real-time equipment conditions, is inefficient while introducing extra expenses and waste. The challenge of asset management further amplifies at hard-to-access, geographically dispersed industrial sites with numerous unattended assets.

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Benefits of IoT for Asset Management

With the Internet of Things (IoT) comes a new generation of low-power, wireless sensors that can turn normal physical objects into digital devices with communications ability. Attached to individual assets, these sensors capture and report detailed information about current asset conditions as well as where and how they are being used. Leveraging robust, long-range IoT connectivity, insights into even the most remote, isolated assets can be gathered at the control center and easily accessible by plant operators and technicians. By having a holistic, real-time picture of cross-site assets, they can quickly pinpoint underutilized equipment, diagnose impending issues and bottlenecks, and easily mobilize tools and parts. Ultimately, the application of IoT for asset management enables organizations to optimize maintenance activities and asset useful life, while eliminating error-prone manual records and excessive orders.

The infographic below captures 18 essential stats about asset management challenges across industries and how IoT can deliver tangible values in this context.