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Tired of not knowing where crucial assets are without making phone calls or having equipment break down due to poor maintenance tracking?
Our cloud-based asset tracking software goes beyond telling you where an asset is. When set up right, it can track which employee has used which asset, the maintenance history of each asset, the value of your assets, and more.
And you don’t need an employee to manually enter tons of data on a computer. With the help of our industry-leading hardware partner, Zebra, you can easily print out your own custom barcode tags for your assets.
How cloud-based asset tracking can help your business
Without a robust asset-tracking system, it’s anything but easy to have a coherent overview of your assets. You’ll probably struggle to answer questions like:
- Where are our assets?
- How old is this asset?
- When was this asset last maintained?
- When should this asset be replaced?
Cloud-based asset tracking helps you easily answer questions like that and gives you a coherent overview of all your equipment. And this comes with many concrete benefits to your business’s bottom line.
Get a concrete overview of all your assets across locations
Cloud-based asset tracking helps you understand where every asset is — the specific office, where in that office, en route to somewhere else. This helps your employees avoid wasting time looking for equipment and stops them from making duplicate purchases.
It also makes it easier to plan projects around the location of certain assets. It can help you foresee bottlenecks in required equipment and preemptively have equipment moved from other locations to avoid slowing projects down.
Reduce asset loss and theft
Any business owner in an industry with valuable equipment has experienced the struggle of asset loss and theft. US home improvement chain Lowe’s reported losing over $1 billion due to “shrinkage” — employee theft and fraud — in 2022. The amounts will be smaller for smaller companies but will often hit harder.
Good asset tracking helps you reduce asset loss and theft because you always know where assets are and who used them last. A cloud-based solution is especially useful because you have a digital record of assets across locations.
Combined with security procedures like installing CCTV, this can help drastically reduce shrinkage due to theft.
Understand the asset lifecycle and extend each asset’s lifespan
Expensive equipment that is crucial to your business processes must be handled in the right way over time. This can be difficult if the asset’s lifespan is longer than a typical employee stays with the company.
With a digitized (and easily accessible) maintenance record for each asset, it's much easier to plan, understand, and manage the asset lifecycle to get more out of your assets. It doesn’t matter if the asset manager is a new hire. They can scan the tag with a mobile device and see the asset history, including the maintenance record, purchase date, and more.
A digital database also makes it easy to log asset depreciation over the years, making tax season a breeze for your accounting staff.
This was a quick rundown, but you can read more about the main benefits of asset management here.
You might be wondering, but how does your software help deliver these benefits? Let’s explore the actual features that will make handling your assets a breeze.
The most important cloud-based asset tracking features
The key features that make cloud-based asset tracking a must include barcode scanning and printing, a centralized asset database, location tracking, unified asset history, and more.
Barcode printing and scanning
The first step in reliably managing your assets is to tag them. RedBeam integrates with Zebra Technologies’ handheld scanners and commercial barcode tag printers.
This means you can easily print out new barcode tags for assets registered in your database.
Because of the support for the Zebra TC52, your team can simply scan these tags when handling an asset.
If they’re doing an inventory, they can scan the asset and register that it’s in its proper location. If they do an in-depth checkup, they can also look at things like maintenance history from within the mobile device.
Centralized asset database
A centralized asset database can be extremely helpful for managers and small business owners. Easy access to this data can help you avoid duplicate purchases, plan budgets more effectively, and execute projects without a hitch.
For example, workers in warehouse one may have identified they need another floor crane. You check your database and notice there’s a floor crane sitting unused in a stockroom in warehouse two. After confirming it’s usable and not needed, you transfer it to warehouse one, making it easier for your staff to do their job safely.
These decisions and adjustments are much easier to make with all the available data.
Location tracking
In RedBeam, location tracking works in this way:
- First, you can set up unlimited locations (like offices, warehouses, and more) inside our cloud-based software.
- Then, you can connect certain devices (like a Zebra TC52) to each location. When scanned with a registered device, this will register assets in a specific location.
- Next, your employees scan the tagged assets when doing inventories and receiving an asset from another location.
- This gives you an up-to-date view of the general location of assets.
If you want more specific real-time location tracking of your assets, you may want to look into an RFID tracking solution.
Unified asset history
With RedBeam, you can also create a unified asset history for all your assets. That means you have a single source for all of your staff's interactions with each asset — maintenance, usage history, any breakdowns, and more.
As you can imagine, this history is very helpful for making a wide range of decisions about the asset lifecycle:
- Is the asset over-used? Do we need to purchase another equivalent tool?
- Is the current maintenance schedule sufficient?
- Should we budget a replacement for next quarter or year?
It helps you answer all of these questions and more. A unified asset history is crucial for extending the lifespan of your assets and maximizing the value you get out of them.
Asset checkout
The next feature makes it much easier for your team to keep a real history of the assets — asset checkout (and check-in).
With RedBeam, checking out an asset is very straightforward — just scan the asset, select the employee, purpose, and length of time, and press the check-out button. They’ve now registered that the asset has been checked out, for what, and by whom.
To check the asset back into the location, you just need to bring it back to the office, scan it, and set the assigned person to the default setting (Unassigned here).
A comprehensive asset check-out process provides a strong incentive against employee theft, as you know who handled each asset and when. It also stops human forgetfulness from leading to lost assets. Sometimes people just forget — luckily, bits of data don’t tend to disappear in the same way. With a unified history, you also have a concrete audit trail that can help you remain compliant with regulations and figure out where anything went wrong in case a valuable asset breaks earlier than expected.
Custom fields and reports
Depending on the type of physical assets you’re dealing with, you may want other data points beyond assigned people, usage, and more. For example, for vehicles, that could include miles driven and a specific field for the last oil change.
By creating custom fields for your assets, RedBeam lets you focus on the data points that matter most in your industry and use case. After all, asset management software is only as useful as its data.
You can also create custom reports based on various data points to identify different trends with your assets. For example, you can compare asset usage across locations, how specific employees deal with different assets, and more.
Smart import
If you want a unified asset history, it’s not enough to start inputting new data after using a smart cloud-based system like RedBeam. You need all of the old data as well.
In some solutions, getting this data into the system involves a lot of manual data entry. Thanks to RedBeam’s smart import feature, this involves much less manual work on your part.
If you have asset data in a spreadsheet or other legacy system, you can use the asset data template to prepare the data for upload and import it in bulk to RedBeam. You don’t have to manually create one and one asset within the dashboard.
The template lets you import everything from asset type, serial number, warehouse, region, descriptions, assigned person, vendor, warranty, and more.
Want to experience the power of these features yourself? Sign up for a free trial today.
How state agencies accelerated asset audits by 70% with RedBeam
A key to achieving operational efficiency is to help your employees spend as little time as possible on menial tasks.
RedBeam does this by speeding up processes like asset inventories and client audits.
For example, RedBeam has helped state and federal agencies reduce time spent on fixed asset audits by up to 70%.
Before RedBeam, property custodians took inventory using pen and paper. While they knew this method was inefficient, they hadn’t found a solution that offered the needed features.
Thankfully, with the mix of RedBeam’s robust asset management software and Zebra’s enterprise-grade hardware, they found the right solution to improve their process. The new workflow drastically reduced the time spent on each audit, helped agencies keep payroll costs low, and improved morale by reducing time spent on repetitive tasks. You can read more about the case study here.
Explore our asset tracking software with a free trial
Cloud-based asset tracking offers all the power of on-site software with a much smoother set-up process. All you need to do is sign up, invest in the proper hardware (like a barcode printer and a few robust handheld scanners), import your asset data, and you’re ready to roll.
Without installing any software, you can access the asset management dashboard from anywhere, on any device.
Access features like barcode printing and scanning, a centralized asset database, location tracking, asset checkout, and more with RedBeam.
To see what it’s like to have everything you need to manage assets efficiently in the cloud — sign up for a free trial today.
