Keys, Wallet, Phone – What Have I Forgotten?

We all have favourite places where we leave them so that we can easily find them later; whether it may be on a bedside table, in the kitchen drawer or a coat pocket etc. Wherever it is, we know where to start looking, but what about office equipment and assets? Where are they?

Office Assets

An office asset could be almost anything, it might be electrical equipment like CAD workstations, laptops, mobile phones, photocopiers, drones, digital cameras etc, but might also be valuable artwork, sculptures, title deeds, or even furniture. It might also be things like software licences.

In each case, you will on occasion ask questions such as who has this asset and where is it now. In other cases you may need to find information relating to the asset or be reminded of when an event is due for instance:

• 3 month advanced reminder of when the photocopier contract needs to be re-negotiated
• When the warranty on the laptop expires
• When the software licences expire
• When the last insurance valuation on the artwork was and what the value was
• In which building and which room the painting is in
• Who the drone is currently checked out to

Roll your own

Anyone with a little database knowledge can knock up a simple asset register to hold this type of information. It can have serial numbers of equipment, key dates and the names of staff that they are allocated to. As anyone who has tried this will know, the problem is that staff forget where the system is, how to log on, and how to use it. So nobody maintains the data, and it quickly becomes useless.

The ideal is that this type of asset management isn’t a separate toolset but instead an extension of your existing environment, so that you can:

1. Click on a building and see what photocopiers are on each floor, their contract dates and user manuals
2. Click on a person and see which laptop, phone and desk space is allocated to them
3. See when the laptop warranty is due to expire, the software installed on it and licensing data
4. Search for equipment, filter for phones and find who has the outdated phone that needs replacing

Customers of our drawing management software Excitech DOCS benefit from not just having a CAD document management system, which is saving them huge amounts of time and helping them achieve and maintain BIM Level 2 accreditation, they also gain from the underlying foundations of M-Files as its vast range of capabilities opens a wealth of opportunities to become more integrated, efficient and organised by taking control of all your assets.

To find out more about our document and drawing management software Excitech DOCS, click here.