BACKGROUND

Most businesses are heavily invested in physical assets that are employed in the operational environment and that assist to generate the company's revenue. Examples include buildings, plants, equipment, vehicles, tools, and people. It is vital to the long-term sustainability of your business that you optimise the productivity of these assets while ensuring their safety and extending their useful lifespan as much as possible. By achieving this, you maximise your investment in these assets and ultimately become more profitable.

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THE FIVE ESSENTIALS OF OPERATIONAL ASSET MANAGEMENT

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The way we see it, optimal management of your operational assets can be separated into 5 essential areas:

 

1. Asset Identification & Verification
   Achieving an accurate asset register within your operations has several business benefits; from complying to financial reporting regulatory requirements, to minimizing the risk of theft and vandalism, to optimising your asset investment decisions.
   
   Since the assets you invest in for your operations are usually valuable, large in number, and are often movable, it is essential that you have a regular, quick and accurate method to uniquely identify, count, and locate each one. This is whether they are inside a single building, outdoors, or spanning across multiple locations in several geographies. 
    

2. Indoor Asset Tracking
   Many businesses have large quantities of assets within their indoor operational environment. Some of these assets should not be moving at all, while others are moving constantly. Examples of these assets include: 
   
   - People, laptops, PCs, monitors, chairs, tables, etc. in smart buildings.
   - Job trays and/or boxes in manufacturing & assembly. 
   - Tools & equipment in automotive manufacturing.
   - Valuable artwork in an art gallery. 
   - Vehicles and keys in an automotive sales warehouse. 
   - Medical equipment in healthcare.
   - Health & Safety equipment in aviation.
   
   There are many more examples of such operational assets. Keeping track of where these assets are at any given time is critical for both efficient operations, as well as for security purposes. Monitoring and controlling where, when, and why these assets are moving (or standing still) allows your business to have better control over them. Providing the right information to the right person just in time, or even automating certain asset control processes, is Real-Time Operational Excellence (RTE) at its best. 
    

3. Outdoor Asset Tracking
   In some businesses, the tracking and management of assets extend to external environments. Examples of this are:
   
   - Fleets of vehicles in logistics, automotive, and healthcare.
   - People, tools, and moveable equipment on remote sites and mines.
   - Service delivery equipment and vehicles in smart cities.
   - Service vehicles and equipment in aviation. 
   - Skips for waste and rubble removal
   - Livestock in agriculture
   
   Having the ability to monitor and control the movement of such outdoor assets in real time substantially improves the related efficiencies, costs, and security risks. Further enhancing this with real-time data, alerts, and automated controls will also assist the operational team to make the correct, data-driven decisions quickly, which again leads to real-time operation excellence.
    

4. Asset Condition/Health Monitoring
   Whether an asset is indoor or outdoor, fixed or moveable, being able to monitor the condition of these assets in real-time becomes critical to maximising their uptime and availability. This could include monitoring temperature, pressure, vibration, and a whole host of other measurements.
   
   Pre-determined thresholds can be set so that if exceeded, the responsible people are alerted immediately and the appropriate actions are taken. For example, the maintenance team can be dispatched automatically to prevent failure, or the equipment switched off remotely in critical situations.
   
   The possibilities are endless and the positive operational impact on the business and its people could be immeasurable.
    

5. Operational Technology (OT) CyberSecurity
   Every business is at risk of a cyber attack and the prevalence of these attacks is
   increasing every day. Most companies have IT CyberSecurity policies and systems in place believing that they are protected. Very few consider the vulnerabilities that are present in their OT environment. Read more.

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OUR SOLUTION

FLEX Digital provides comprehensive operational asset management solutions. What sets us apart is our ability to provide passive and active, indoor and outdoor asset identification & verification, tracking, as well as health/condition monitoring through our single, integrated digital platform.

 

We leverage a combination of various innovative technologies to achieve this. Examples include RFID, BLE, UWB, IoT, OT CyberSecurity, and Artificial Intelligence.