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Sahil asks on this post:

"Since most of your audience are computer geeks, how about an english friendly, non-mba description of what "Asset Management" is .. and why should I care?"

Well, the MBA description isn't so bad.  So here's a small business lesson that is common sense, but important to the concept of Asset Management.  You see, a business is designed to make money.  Duh right?  Well, once you are operating a business, there are two main ways that you can make more money:

1. Increasing revenue/sales.
2. Lowering costs.

Asset management focuses on #2.  At its most basic description, Asset Management means simply keeping track of all of your "fixed assets".  Fixed assets are real property that your business owns, it can be anything from vehicles to computers to the chair that you are sitting on right now.  Easy Assets .NET is designed to help businesses lower their daily operations costs.  Properly used, there are many ways in which this is possible.

Purchasing

Cost savings in purchasing break down into a few ways:

1. How can you know what to purchase if you don't know what you currently have:  Being able to quickly search through your asset database allows you to view assets for the entire company, by department, etc to determine which assets are getting old and are up for replacement.
2. Software License compliance:  This is becoming a major problem for organizations that do not keep track of their licenses.  You can be fined big time for installing software on more computers than you have paid licenses for.  In Easy Assets you can assign parent to child relationships between assets .  For example, you can create a microsoft office license asset record and assign it to a Dell pc.  If you buy another Dell pc and search for a ms-office license none will be found (because it's already assigned).  This immediately lets you know that you're out of licenses.
3. Keep track of purchasing information: Asset records can be generated from purchase orders, or you can explicitly put purchase price information into the system.  This can be a quick lookup for you to recall how much you've paid for assets in the past, and in the case of evaluating new vendors, comparing prices.

Accountability

It is in the best interests of your company to know who has which assets and make employees aware that they are accountable for their assets.  Easy Assets allows you to assign assets to departments and employees.  Doing this allows companies to keep tabs on their assets and should something turn up missing, they know who was responsible for the asset.  I've seen cases where a company is re-organizing and they open a closet and find a pile of old pc's and monitors and no one seems to know that they even existed.  With the proper use of an asset management system these assets would be showing up in your queries and would not be forgotten.  Your accounting departments will love this since they need information like this to depreciate and/or dispose of assets that are no longer useful.

Contracts and Warranty Information

Most things you purchase come with a limited warranty... but how many of you actually keep those warranty insert cards?  Now the few of you that do, how quickly could you pull that card out of filing if you needed information off it?  Most companies have service agreements with local repair firms.  Do you know the terms of those agreements off the top of your head?  Do you know which assets are covered by the agreement?  Are you notified when warranties or service contracts are running out?

Bottom line is that reparing an asset once it is out of warranty is very very expensive.  So tracking this information properly in a program like Easy Assets allows you to keep tabs on this information and never be caught with a broken asset with an expired service contract.

Track Maintenance Costs (ROI)

ROI is one of those MBA terms Sahil hates, it means "Return on Investment".  To break this concept down simply, think of your office printer.  If you paid $500 for the printer, you could estimate just about how much benefit ($) you get from running print jobs.  What most organizations don't track, however, is the costs associated with maintaining that printer.  Printers break, they jam, you have to call in service techs.  If you're not keeping track of the time you're spending doing this, how can you know whether keeping that printer is a good investment? 

This is where the helpdesk feature of Easy Assets comes in.  You can create an issue ticket for that asset, and the tech that completes the job can record the number of hours spent repairing it.  The asset details shows all the historical tickets and there are several reports that show aggregate data for # of tickets and # of hours by asset type.  This allows you to answer some questions to save you money:

1. Should I replace an asset: In the case of the printer above, lets say you have a cost associated with tech work of $70/hr.  Over the last 6 months, you have had to have the techs fix the printer 4 times, at an average of 3 hours per support ticket.  That's 12 hours of support at $70/hr, or $840.  So guess what?  You have been spending more than 50% of what the printer was originally worth.  You should get rid of it and purchase a more reliable printer!  Having these numbers in your hand tell the business that even if you spent $1340 on a better printer, you would break even as far as your costs.  Those of you out there who complain about having poor equipment in the office... hard data like this can convince your superiors to buy a better product!
2. Dealing with vendors: When that printer vendor comes calling trying to sell you more equipment, slap them with the above data.  You have evidence that their product was a poor purchase decision and this gives you power over the vendor.  Make them give you a better service contract if you can show that their product is troublesome, find a new vendor if not.  Information is power!
3. Staff Training: What if you find that the vast majority of your helpdesk tickets are your office people having trouble with a certain software package?  By being able to track and run reports on where most of your problems are coming from you can draw conclusions about where better training for your end users will be more cost effective than the time you're spending handling their support tickets.
4. Know when not to buy coverage: Vendors are always pushing expensive maintenance contracts at you.  However if it is a product that you see in reporting that has had few or no problems over its life, you can make the judgement call to not extend coverage and spend that money elsewhere.

Insurance Savings

Collecting insurance in case of a disaster can be quite a trying process.  The insurance provider will want model numbers, serial numbers, purchase information, photographs... generally the more information you can provide the insurance provider about your assets the more likely you are to get reimbursed for that asset.  A good asset management system is a great "cover your ass" investment.

Government Reporting

As budgets continue to tighten for schools and government agencies, I can almost guarentee you that the reporting requirements for these organizations to the state/fed will increase.  Odds are, if you get government funding, you'll have to start providing this data, if you aren't already.

So as you can see, when properly used there are many ways which you can lower the costs of doing business.  Proper asset management will more than pay for itself over time, it just takes the discipline to create a process and stick with it.  I'm sure there are plenty more creative ways to save money using this data, this is just an off the cuff list.