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Asset Management On The Move
Asset Management On The Move
One city filled with over one million residents makes Dallas, TX the 9th largest city in the United States. The City of Dallas’ Department of Intergovernmental Services is always on the move overseeing equipment for several operational units that own and operate a total of approximately 4,500 assets. Serious assets call for serious management, but how do you know if your organisation has what it takes to track all assets efficiency?
Organisations all around the world
manage multiple different assets every day. The Bomb Squad, Urban Search and Rescue team, SWAT, the DPD Intelligence Unit, the Water Department and Information Technology are just a few of the operational units that the Department of Intergovernmental Services manage. The assets range from armored vehicles to laptops, from handheld police radios to mobile GPS systems and from specialized equipment to helicopter parts; Dallas’ Department of Intergovernmental Services does it all.
However, asset management is valued on an even larger scale; it plays a key role in the financing of the economy as whole. According to the
April 2015 review of Asset Management in Europe by the European Fund and Asset Management Association (EFAMA), “European asset management contributes on average 0.35% per year to European GDP.” While this is calculated using a revenue-based measure of value-added, it is also shown that “the estimated value added per year that the industry creates in the UK is the largest (0.95% of GDP), compared to 0.50% in France and 0.21% in Germany.”
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So, what’s Dallas’ Department of Intergovernmental Services’ solution for keeping the City of Dallas secure?
Three simple concepts:
- Ensuring the mission critical equipment used by departments like SWAT and Homeland Security is property maintained and ready for use
- Easily completing annual audits for grant funding compliance in one day
- Saving time, money and unnecessary asset spending
However, the Department of Intergovernmental didn’t always implement the above concepts. For years, they used a decentralized approach to tracking assets where each unit receiving equipment was responsible for
maintaining asset records, maintenance records, and tracking which employees had checked items in and out.
“Every two years, each unit was required to inventory all their
grant-funded items and send them to us so we could compile asset reports. We found that we were spending more time trying to fill in the gaps to make sure all equipment had been inventoried than actually analyzing the reports,” said Dina Colarossi, Fund Analyst for Dallas’ Department of Intergovernmental Services. The issue was magnified during yearly audits.
This inefficient system caused the organisation over
two weeks to complete a report, when the reports needed to be compiled as soon as possible.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
The Department of Intergovernmental Services simply had enough and deemed it necessary to research an upgrade from manually tracking assets after countless time consuming audits. The first step for the organisation was switching to an
automated asset tracking system.
Ray Thomason, Dallas’ Urban Search and Rescue Logistics Lieutenant, was using Wasp Mobile Asset for years to track assets and take control during a deployment. “Lieutenant Thomason found the Wasp solution to be a valuable tool to track his unit’s assets. He proposed adopting an automated asset tracking system from Wasp to track the department’s grant funded assets,” explained Colarossi.
When your manual asset tracking system simply isn’t getting the job done, you too can say, “enough is enough” and find
an automated system that fits your needs. While each asset tracking system serves different purposes, it’s essential to choose the right system for your organisation. The Department of Intergovernmental Services selected Wasp MobileAsset, a professional software that includes barcode label printers and mobile computers, to efficiency track their assets.
MOVING ALONG
For the past three years, the Department of Intergovernmental Services has implemented Wasp MobileAsset.
“Since deploying Wasp’s solution, there has been a huge change in the way we track our assets,” stated Colarossi. “Having a centralized database with all our assets means we no longer have to compare inventory lists to purchasing records to make sure we are catching every item. It also helps to ensure there is continuity as people are promoted or move on to other assignments.”
The benefits don’t stop there. Colarossi and her team found the benefits of Wasp MobileAsset to also include:
- Easily creating reports
- Saving valuable time and money
“Before MobileAsset, producing a complete asset report for an audit would have taken two weeks, now it takes between one or two days. Since we are also able to attach documents to the items in Wasp, we now have any records the auditors might ask for at our fingertips.”
STAYING ON THE MOVE
This system has become so successful for the Department of Intergovernmental Services that other departments are asking them to use their Wasp system to track their assets.
If your organisation is in the trenches, spending countless hours on manually tracking assets, maybe it’s time you make the move. No more time consuming audits, no more unnecessary spending and no more incomplete records for annual reporting. Implementing Wasp MobileAsset made the world of difference for the entire City of Dallas, and can do the same for you organisation. Taking the first step and researching an automated asset tracking system for your business, can lead to a lifetime of security, efficiency and benefits.
How would a dedicated asset management system help your employees find the necessary equipment?
