Asset Management

Overview

As supply chains become more complex and material flow increases, supply chain assets are increasingly becoming a bottleneck. Containers, chassis, trailers, trucks, ULD’s, racks, and trays become scarce and limit planned supply chain operations. Anyone trying to move goods during the peak season understands this well. Fleet operators have a continual challenge to position their assets properly and keep the fleet size aligned with business objectives. Failure to do so results in poor asset utilization, lower margins, poor service, and excessive capital expenditure. In a service driven industry, customer service and satisfaction is critical to acquiring and retaining customers.

Challenges

• Lack of Visibility to Asset Inventory – Most companies struggle tracking their mobile assets, not knowing for sure where they are at any given point. Customers may not return them in a timely manner, and may even carry safety stock for their own utilization. This causes needless investment of capital into more assets.

• Poor Asset Utilization – Poor visibility to asset location and disposition lead to excessive idle time and private stockpiles for customers. As such, many companies get very low utilization of their current assets.

• Manual Asset Reservation – Many companies accept all customer orders and manually allocate assets to orders. If assets aren’t available then users are forced to either on-hire or lease additional assets temporarily. These activities are time consuming processes, labor intensive, error prone, and lead to service failures and low customer satisfaction.

• High Peak Season Demands – During the heavy seasonal peaks customers require the appropriate equipment so they can move their goods. If the assets are not positioned correctly, then this will either cause the company to purchase or lease more assets or the customer may look elsewhere for this service. Companies need to effectively plan to meet their seasonal demand spikes.

• Improper Fleet Size – Many fleets change over time. Mergers, maintenance, and loss cause the fleet size to fluctuate; in some cases beyond what’s necessary to support business objectives. Oversized fleets yield poor utilization and ROA; undersized fleets yield reduced margins and lower revenues.

• Inadequate Linkage Between Assets and Shipments – Customers track information by their key reference numbers, while companies have their own. Also included in that is the physical asset that is carrying or moving the product. To provide enhanced tracking and exception planning, companies need to understand the relationship between assets and associated order and product information.

The Solution Features

• Asset Lifecycle Management – Manage each asset individually throughout its lifecycle, from commissioning to retirement.

• Asset Positioning – Reposition assets to meet customer demands and minimize costs.

• Fleet Planning – Optimize fleet size to meet business objectives.

• Asset Reservation – Allocate and reserve assets for customer orders.

• Order Tracking – Track customer contract status and alert proactively when there are violations.

• Integration – Leverage any data collection infrastructure.

• Performance Management – Track key metrics and provide detailed analytics.

The Solution Benefits

• Increase Asset Utilization

• Increase Revenue

• Increase Margin

• Increase Return On Asset (ROA)

• Reduce Operating Costs

• Increase Productivity