Effective Strategies for Asset Life Cycle Management: Tips and Pitfalls

If you’re tired of seeing your assets depreciate faster than you can manage, you must equip your business with asset life cycle management. Managing an asset’s life cycle can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be – especially if you’re using the right strategies.

In this post, we’ll go over some of the most effective asset life cycle management strategies and how you can master them to transform your approach and ease your business operations.

What Is Asset Life Cycle Management?

Asset life cycle management (ACLM) is a process companies use to manage their physical assets throughout their lifecycle. This optimizes the value by maintaining them, using them efficiently, and disposing of them responsibly. 

Since every industry has assets, it’s best to use them to their full potential and follow the ALCM systems. Here are a few scenarios:

• Manufacturing: Manufacturers depend upon the upkeep and smooth functioning of their equipment, as any downtime can be costly, especially due to a lack of maintenance. For example, manufacturing companies can use ALCM to track equipment maintenance and repair records, identifying potential problems early on.
• Healthcare: Hospitals and other healthcare providers need ALCM to ensure their medical devices and equipment are safe and compliant with regulations. ALCM is used to test the accuracy and safety of equipment used on patients.
• Transportation: ALCM can help transportation companies manage their vehicles, keeping them running efficiently and safely for drivers, passengers, and goods. For transportation businesses, ALCM can track, for example, the maintenance history and fuel efficiency of their vehicles. This helps identify vehicles that need replacement or repair.
• Energy: Energy companies managing pipelines and power plants cannot afford to slack when it comes to asset life cycle management. Neglecting them would result in not only a loss of money and resources but potentially a safety hazard. Using ALCM to track the condition of their infrastructure can prevent costly outages. 

Benefits of Life Cycle Asset Management

Following the correct ALCM protocol can give your company a number of benefits, including:

• Reduced Costs: A broken-down asset will incur repair costs or require a new purchase, so the cost of acquisition and downtime are both bad news for your business. Regular maintenance and monitoring prevent that.
• Improved Efficiency: With ALCM, you can regularly check up on your assets and ensure they’re in top condition. This improves efficiency and extends their lifespan.
• Valuable Information: ALCM provides business owners and stakeholders with invaluable information about their assets. This allows them to make data-driven decisions and make better plans.
• Regulation and Compliance: Industries like hospitals and food and beverages are required by law to maintain certain standards. ALCM assists these industries in complying with regulations and compliance factors.

5 Key Stages of Asset Life Cycle Management

There are five major stages of asset life cycle management that you must know about:

1. Planning

This is when the decision-makers have to collectively identify the company’s need for certain assets. How this asset would benefit the company, its projected acquisition and maintenance cost, and analyze any potential risks to make an informed decision. The assets are then thoroughly researched, including comparing models, functionality, reliability, cost, and lifespan.

2. Acquisition

Once it has been decided which asset to get, it’s time to acquire it. Depending upon the nature and cost of the asset, a decision must be made between purchasing or leasing it. Your budget should account for not just the acquisition cost but also other factors like delivery, installation, and training. Test the asset and make sure it meets all the safety standards and performs as expected.

3. Operation

Once the asset is secured, it’s time to provide your staff with the required training for its safe and efficient use. They need to go through training programs and manuals to learn how to best maintain and utilize the asset. From there, begin using it while constantly monitoring its performance using metrics like uptime, energy consumption, and output. Based on that, create documentation and reports on it.

4. Maintenance

Using the operations team’s reports, determine what kind of maintenance is required for your asset. Learning about preventive, routine, and predictive maintenance and life cycle management can help you get the most out of your assets.

Create a maintenance schedule and procedure based on its specific requirements and risk factors. It is also best to keep spare parts and regular maintenance tools in stock in your inventory to perform timely fixes and avoid downtime.

5. Disposal

Eventually, an asset will reach its end of life, and maintaining it becomes extremely complicated or expensive, or it simply becomes outdated. Once you conclude that it is time for a replacement, you can take one of the following routes:

• You can resale or transfer the asset to another business;
• You can donate it to a non-profit organization;
• You can dispose of it via recycling or scrapping while keeping in mind the environmental impact of it.

Strategies for Asset Life Cycle Management

From acquisition to disposal, using effective strategies to manage your asset life cycle better can take your business a long way. 

Utilize Technology

Gone are the days when documentation was done solely on a physical paper. Those are hard to manage and are prone to error. Instead, it’s better to use an Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) tool. 

But what is EAM? It’s a solution that can be applied to optimize the lifecycle of your assets, from acquisition to disposal. It provides a centralized location for all asset information, like location, maintenance history, performance data, and financial records. This makes tracking and monitoring of the assets throughout their lifecycle very convenient and makes decision-making easier.

In addition, Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) software can be used alongside EAM, as they offer various benefits. If you’re wondering what CMMS software is, it’s a solution that helps record work orders, track assets and inventory in real-time, schedule maintenance, and so much more. It’s useful for all industries, especially those that rely on assets that require regular maintenance, like machinery or specialized equipment.

We recommend using our asset management tool, LLumin CMMS+. It provides a centralized database and various effective productivity tools that will help your organization track a huge number of asset types, entities, and facilities. It’ll also improve your workforce’s effectiveness and productivity. 

Integrate With Other Systems

CMMS software can be integrated with business software from other departments, such as HR, finance, IT, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This allows cross-team collaborations and provides a better view of the assets.

For example, when integrated with HR software, the department can seamlessly share real-time info about technician availability, certifications, and training schedules with your maintenance team. This means maintenance managers can assign tasks to the most qualified person in charge, ensuring safety standards are met, and maintenance operations run smoothly.

Also, with access to a clear schedule of technician shifts and availability, your maintenance team can plan preventive maintenance activities more effectively. The result? Reduced downtime and the assurance that the right employees are always on hand for critical tasks.

Let AI Assist

It’s best to schedule maintenance before a predicted failure instead of waiting for an asset to fail and fixing expensive breakdowns, decreasing the asset’s lifespan and leading to downtime. When you use our CMMS+ software, LLumin, you can let AI pick up on patterns, data, analytics, and historical records to predict potential failures and recommend predictive or preventive measures.

Manage Spare Parts Better

Maintaining critical spare parts within your inventory is always a good idea because fortune favors the prepared. Using LLumin, you can track spare part inventory levels and reorder parts as and when necessary. Use our just-in-time system to minimize storage costs and reduce the chances of a spare part’s degradation.

Use an Asset Management Life Cycle Diagram

The asset management life cycle is merely a framework for tracking and managing assets throughout their lifetimes. However, visualizing it via diagrams is an effective way to understand it through the different stages of its life. 

Here are some benefits of it:

• Improved Clarity: Visualizing all stages of ALCM, from acquisition to disposal, helps us better understand how they interconnect and impact each other. 
• Better Planning and Decision-Making: Diagrams help identify problems in your ALCM process. It also visualizes how resources are allocated, making optimizing it easier.
• More Effective Strategies: Data visualization makes it easier to find the low-hanging fruit in your overall strategy. Diagrams make it simple to see where your resources are being spent. 
• Better Communication: Not everyone likes big numbers, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Different individuals prefer different mediums of data representation. Diagrams can help newer employees grasp the ALCM process easily.

How LLumin Can Manage Your Asset Life Cycle

By now, it should be obvious that efficiently performing asset life cycle management can make a huge difference for your company, from decreasing unnecessary spending to ensuring minimal downtime.

To help you with that, LLumin provides a complete solution to asset life cycle management challenges. With our advanced EAM software and CMMS+ platform, you can streamline the process of managing your assets throughout their life cycle. It makes the process of auditing assets so much more convenient. 

Here are some of the many benefits you’ll get:

• Thorough Asset Tracking: LLumin provides a centralized platform where all information about assets is stored. This makes decision-making easier, as all the real-time data is available to you in a single place, with analysis to support it. 
• Maintenance Management: Our software uses advanced AI to help you manage all aspects of your asset’s maintenance and management. The toll can automatically schedule maintenance tasks based on factors like historical data, usage reports, and real-time conditions. It also keeps track of spare parts inventory. 
• Asset Performance Tracking: Our AI-powered analytical features can help you track asset performance and identify trends. This information can help you identify potential problems and upcoming maintenance early on.
• Regulatory Compliance: Many regulations must be considered to avoid fines and penalties. LLumin helps you comply with asset management regulations, such as ISO 55000 and PAS 55.
• Support and Implementation: Our company offers training, support, and implementation guides for adopting the CMMS+ solution. Our dedicated team of project managers at LLumin helps you transition into using the software. We also provide ongoing customer support to resolve any issues you may run into.

One of our many happy clients, Oceania Dairy, gained tremendous peace of mind after using our software. It’s a company that produces highly valued dairy nutrition to nourish people for a better, healthy life. They faced some hefty challenges before teaming up with LLumin. First off, the danger of dust explosions was a constant worry. With powdered milk being highly combustible, ensuring the safety of their plant and 400 employees was no small task.

Plus, keeping track of complex maintenance schedules took a lot of work. Missed inspections or delayed maintenance could create havoc. And let’s not forget the headache of passing strict audits necessary to maintain their high safety standards and regulatory compliance.

Enter LLumin’s CMMS+. Our game-changing system automated safety protocols and maintenance schedules, ensuring everything ran smoothly and safely. With LLumin, Oceania Dairy could easily store and retrieve maintenance records, ditching the error-prone paper-based system. The result? A safer work environment, smoother maintenance operations, and audit processes that went from hassle to a piece of cake.

Interested in achieving similar efficiency? Businesses worldwide use LLumin CMMS+ to manage their asset audits better, and you can, too. Request a free demo of our software to get started.

Closing Thoughts

Any company can improve its performance and operations by ensuring its assets are in top condition, but doing so is not the most straightforward task. Fortunately, our CMMS+ software gives you a clear and complete approach to asset life cycle management, offering various features to ease the task of managing assets. Schedule your free software demo today!

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