Asset Management

Let's start with a scenario. You're an oil and gas producer and you have production equipment all across the country. Someone asks you for a list of all the operational compressors in western Canada and what their current condition is. Nervous? If you have an accurate Asset Management System then you shouldn't be.

Asset Management means something a little different for every organization, but the core principles of it are:

  • Detail tracking of the asset (what is it? Who makes it? How much is it worth? Where did it come from? What condition is it in? where is it now?).
  • Life cycle tracking of the "Asset" (i.e. car, computer, compressor, advertising space)
  • Consolidation of information into one universally accessible location to assist with decision making.

Some of the tools that help to make up AMS are:

Granular Data Access Control — Companies must find the balance between making sure that people have access to all the information they need to make informed and relevant decisions and ensuring that people do not have access to information they don't require. For example, someone in sales needs to be able to pull sales forecast and history reports, but they may not need to see, nor should they have the ability to change custom credit information. Granular data access control allows companies to be very specific in the way they control access to information and is an essential tool in systems such as Asset Management.

Management of change (MOC) — MOC not only controls who has access to specific asset information, it also tracks who is accessing it and more importantly, who is changing it. By being able to track all the changes (location, condition, status etc.) made to an asset, along with who made the change and when the change was made, companies are able to construct a fully auditable history of an asset.

Material Transfer — provides a tool for tracking how assets move in and out of a company by tracking the purchase, transfer and sale of the equipment along with all the details of the transaction (price, seller, purchaser, date, etc.).

Document Management — Basic document and image management allows you to associate documents or images with an asset (invoice, condition images, and service records).

Asset Searching and Reporting — Generally, companies only implement AMS when they have a large number of assets to track, or a large number of people that need access to the asset data. For this reason, robust asset searching and reporting tools help users identify and extract specific details and sub sets of asset data.

Who has Urban Lighthouse done AMS for?

  • ADI
  • Anadarko Canada
  • Calgary Flames
  • Canadian Remarketing Group
  • Peyto Energy Trust
  • Sequoia Environmental