Asset management can be extremely challenging. How does a city manage their above and below ground assets? How does a utility best coordinate staff tasked with maintaining an uninterrupted water or power supply?

There are many long established solution providers in the market selling products designed to help manage assets. Most of these products serve smaller organizations poorly. We will explore in this blog post some new modern approaches to asset management which are more geared to smaller organizations.

Map Driven Asset Management for Small Organizations

Complex, Expensive Asset Management 

Most asset management systems on the market today are best suited to large organizations. Complex and expensive describes many of these solutions. Designed to manage a complicated web of assets, and used to coordinate a large workforce. Think about managing a city the size of Los Angeles. Many of these asset management solutions are powered by an enterprise GIS platform like ArcGIS. That requires one asset management platform licence and one GIS platform licence. Add to that maintenance and customization, and costs are pushed far out of the reach of small and medium sized organizations.

The old adage ‘managing complexity requires complexity’ remains apparently true.

Simple, Cost Effective Asset Management 

Small and medium sized organizations are increasingly looking for better ways to manage their assets. There is a growing demand to replace manual ‘pen and paper’ processes, and poorly designed software with simple, cost effective asset management solutions. The current tech revolution, with the move towards mobile and cloud computing, is creating new ways to modernize asset management without the high cost of many of the existing systems.

What is GeoAppSmart AM? 

Working with an engineering partner, WebMapSolutions have been building a simple asset management app called GeoAppSmart AM for a group of small cities in the state of Michigan. Affordable and simple were two core requirements  As were workflows and functionality which fit exactly the needs of staff.

The main functional components of the app are broken down into 3 core areas:

1. Managing staff – Add and edit users

2. Managing assets – View, add and edit work orders, assign work order to assets, report work completed, cluster and print work orders

3. Reporting – Generate PDF reports based on key asset and work order criteria.

In the second part of this blog post series we will discuss the simple workflows built into the GeoAppSmart AM app. We will also consider how the mobile app integrates with other complimentary solutions.

Contact us with questions.

Author: Staff Writer