Asset Visibility: Why It Matters To Your Business
In today’s complex business environment, full asset visibility is critical for every organization. If you aren’t tracking your assets and their associated costs, you can’t manage them effectively. In this article, we’ll discuss what asset visibility is, why it matters, and the types of asset visibility available.
What Is Asset Visibility?
Asset visibility is the ability to track, manage, and control all assets within a business. Your asset inventory includes equipment, vehicles, supplies, and even personnel. Total asset visibility allows you to manage and track assets more efficiently, which in turn helps you spot vulnerabilities and optimize your operations.
IT Asset Visibility
Asset visibility, unsurprisingly, also applies to pieces of technology like servers and data sources, laptop and desktop computers, and company-issued mobile devices, known as “endpoints.” IT assets can also mean programs, apps, and other digital assets, such as cloud service subscriptions that the end user needs to perform their job.
In today’s connected world, asset management has become crucial for maintaining a resilient business environment. The ability to see all of an organization’s devices and software—and the data they store—is becoming increasingly important as technology advances at breakneck speeds. This can lead to increased productivity and new revenue streams for companies that leverage them effectively. Asset management also helps with compliance issues related to General Data Protection Regulations or other federal mandates such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) for healthcare organizations.
Asset management tools automate many compliance tasks (such as hardware inventory, software licenses, and software usage metrics across all systems) within an enterprise system. With asset management, administrators don’t have to perform these tasks manually; this frees up valuable time for more important activities like managing security threats instead!
Reusable Asset Visibility
There is also the issue of reusable asset visibility. Reusable assets include anything meant to be returned to a business, manufacturer, or producer after shipment or reused in a company’s facilities. Businesses use cases, totes, racks, plastic pallets, and other items during production. These assets cost money, and losing them doesn’t just mean that a business’s bottom line is affected; there is also the time spent reordering them and waiting for them to arrive.
Many businesses and manufacturers are now taking initiatives like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to track these reusable assets between separate facilities or during shipment to other companies, ensuring that these assets are monitored and returned to their place of origin. These assets become part of a company’s IoT (Internet of Things) and integrate into the web of IoT devices.
Benefits of Asset Visibility
- Improved asset management. Asset visibility enables you to secure, track and report on all of your assets in real-time. It also helps you keep tabs on things like their location, usage, and condition, saving valuable time that might otherwise be spent troubleshooting and mitigation of the effects of asset shortages.
- Better cybersecurity. As the world becomes more digitally connected, the threat of cyberattacks continues to grow. A lack of IT asset visibility puts you at risk for data breaches or leakage due to bad actors who could gain access to sensitive information about your employees or customers if they can hack into an organization’s IT systems undetected.
- More insightful business continuity planning (BCP). A major reason why companies fail after an emergency situation is that they’re unprepared for it in advance by not having a BCP plan that includes adequate budgets for recovery efforts after a disaster strikes.
Gain Full Visibility of Your Reusable Assets
To gain control over your reusable assets, contact the supply chain experts at Real Time Intelligence. They partner with companies to track reusable assets between installations and locations both near and far. Reusable asset visibility will always be clear with Real Time Intelligence.
