Best Practices in Equipment Management
Part 4: Detailed and Accurate Inventories
Inventories are part of everyday operations for many. Often inventories are time consuming but worthwhile to execute, or in some cases even mandatory. The effort of managing inventory operations can feel like a nightmare category problem especially if some time has passed since the previous inventory. The future inventory management can be made a lot easier by labeling equipment during one of the inventories and implementing equipment management system.
By regular inventories of equipment it is possible to ensure that all equipment is available and at their correct location. At the same time it's easy to remove ghost equipment from the balance sheet(the fixed assets that do not exist in reality even if shown in the system). Inventory management can be improved by for example attaching barcode or RFID-labels to assets, and also by efficient label scanning devices.
If during an inventory it's found out that something of value is missing, it's important to be able to track the usage log of that device. Without a proper system and a reliable log, tracking missing equipment can turn out to be extremely challenging.
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Part 5: Utilize Reservations to Manage Transportable Equipment