4 reasons why your business needs asset tracking
Asset tracking is a sophisticated technology that lets businesses manage, track and report on their valuable assets. By logging real-time asset activity in a centralised database, you can be confident you're getting the maximum return from your assets, and ensure that all your assets are receiving timely and comprehensive maintenance.
While vehicle tracking has been around for years, tracking of non-powered assets such as trailers and equipment has previously caused some headaches. Asset tracking is not only limited to vehicle tracking. With the combination of integrated software and innovative hardware solutions, you can stay connected to every type of asset, from industrial equipment to smart sensors, and even people.
When equipped with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, businesses can take their asset management to the next level, automating manual processes and setting real-time alerts to deliver insights faster. The possibilities are endless, and businesses that take advantage of these technologies will gain a wide range of essential benefits for profitability and growth.
What are the main benefits of asset tracking?
1. Optimise utilisation
Expensive equipment needs to pay its way by generating a healthy return for your business. With full visibility of your asset data, your business can determine which assets are being underutilised and prompt you to take action. For example, you might be surprised by how many vehicles in your fleet are sitting unproductively.
Connect's asset tracking solution helps you understand in more detail how and when your assets are being utilised. With more comprehensive data analyses, you'll have a rich source of operator data, asset health and productivity information so you can take the proactive steps to improving utilisation and right-sizing your fleet of assets or vehicles. This results in cost savings and streamlined processes which often extends the longevity of an asset to keep it running for future use.
When data is shared with other business systems via an API - including ERPs, CRMs and more - asset data can provide a single accurate source of truth for usage, resources and performance. This unlocks more accurate costings and smarter business decisions around resource allocation.
With centralised data and helpful insights from AI, you'll be able to optimise your asset utilisation, fit more jobs into each day, and save on expenses from right-sizing your fleet.
2. Prevent asset loss
Poorly secured industrial equipment is a common target for thieves, and once missing, recovery is often extremely difficult without asset tracking.
A study conducted by Telsyte for Telstra in 2019 found that the loss of assets - big and small - cost Australian organisations collectively $4.3 billion every year. The study found that, on average, businesses spend at least 55 hours a year searching for lost physical assets that don't have a tracker attached.
An asset tracking platform like Connect provides live tracking and geo-fencing alerts that will detect and alert you if an asset is moved out of a specific geographical location, letting you act immediately and increasing your chances of recovery. Other insights such as route recaps from historical data can help you trace exactly where your assets have been.
3. Reduce costs and maximise tax rebates
Complete asset visibility and remote monitoring is essential for optimising routes, cutting down wasted time looking for assets, utilising idle assets and preventing theft. Fleet optimisation, for example, allows you to see if your assets are operating at capacity. If not, you can reduce the size of your fleet and realise an immediate financial gain.
And did you know you can increase your fuel tax credits claim to 42.3c per litre used on private roads versus only 16.2c when standard Australian accounting practice is applied?
When you can prove the history of your fleet and the fuel used, you're able to make the highest possible claims. Connect enables you to maximise fringe benefit rebates and fuel tax credits with automated journey data, fuel consumption and mileage. These reports are stored securely and are easily shared to provide all the supporting evidence you need for your FTC claims.
4. Data-driven decision-making
An asset tracking platform gives you accurate, real-time data so that your business decisions are based on facts, not opinion or instinct. Remote monitoring technology sends real-time data to your IoT platform, for precise decision-making to drive greater efficiency.
AI excels at pulling insights and recognising patterns from large sets of asset data at a level previously unachievable. It analyses your data and surfaces predictions, recommendations and trends to help you make accurate data-driven decisions. By presenting you with real-time data from multiple sources, your business can improve asset utilisation, optimise routes and mitigate risks you may not have even considered.
Want to improve your productivity and reduce costs with asset tracking?
Connect can transform how your business collects and uses data to inform your decision-making. It comes equipped with AI and machine learning tools that transform your asset data into predictive insights and alerts.
We've also intentionally designed our Connect solution to be user-friendly. Much of our hardware is plug and play and our software platform is built with your user experience in mind. Read more about Connect and get in touch with the team