The Value of Asset Management Software for Manufacturers

Deliver Better Insight to Your Customers

A Deloitte Insights piece from 2019 highlights how “asset performance management” programs inside of industrial, manufacturing, and petrochemical companies can do more than just improve maintenance outcomes and management of industrial equipment and systems. With these programs in place, the organization can deliver insights to improve reliability of equipment and thus uptime.

Manufacturers, distributors, suppliers and dealers are in a quest to build stickier and more symbiotic relationships with their customers. They seek to create long-term value and leverage “cognitive” information technologies, such as asset management software, which at the highest level extend asset lifetimes, reduce downtime and, in fact, drive direct-to-customer parts sales.

Extending the lifetime of industrial equipment and tools is fundamentally about parts.  Anticipating, predicting, even preventing parts failures is a must for competing. Accurately identifying, diagnosing and replacing parts, quickly, is essential as well. But how can a manufacturer, distributor, or supplier enable this for its customers, dealers, customer service, sales and maintenance teams?

The short answer is: the latest cloud integrated software tools.

Deloitte talks about the maturity of an organization’s asset management systems in terms of where they are on a continuum of technological sophistication.  So from a manufacturer’s point of view, do its customers tend to react and fix at random?  Do they have a time-based, conditions-based or regulatory-based matrix that tells them when to address maintenance?

Technologically Mature Organization Have these Systems in Place

The most technologically mature of organizations have in place IT systems, tools, and real-time services that offer predictive and even preventative programs which bring together operations, supplier, inventory and customer service teams to analyze, react to inputs, generate work orders and maintain uptime.

Manufacturers can provide their customers with cost efficient, easy to use tools which integrate with internal systems, or actually provide the customer with manufacturer-supplied, web-enabled platforms. This helps customers understand parts information, examine interactive parts schematics catalogs, see maintenance histories, manage parts procurement and conduct in-app ordering — all packaged and presented in familiar mobile-user eCommerce-style interfaces.

Is asset management software right for your manufacturing company? Ask yourself these two questions:

• Do you strive for better customer collaboration?
• Will tools, data, and ease-of-use influence your customers decision making?

Enabling these customer, dealer, and supplier-centric systems can be achieve with the right strategy and the right partner. If you’re interest in exploring this further, please share a few details and we will be in touch.