One of the most promising application areas of the Internet of Things (IoT) is asset tracking or asset managemet.
Asset management (or asset tracking) is the process of keeping track of your company’s physical assets and their information. Depending on your business, physical assets can mean different kinds of equipment like Ships, Cranes, IT devices, Bus or vehicles there is no limitation of the assets.
So the million dollar question is... what’s all the hype about? Is it really worth? Can't we do the same way? Is it really required? and then how can we utilize IoT in asset tracking?
Asset management (or asset tracking) is the process of keeping track of your company’s physical assets and their information. Depending on your business, physical assets can mean different kinds of equipment like Ships, Cranes, IT devices, Bus or vehicles there is no limitation of the assets.
Traditional way of managing assets (which is how many companies still manage their assets) is to use siloed systems, such as handwritten lists or Excel sheets, to keep track of the assets information. These kinds of systems are inefficient and vulnerable to errors, but they’re better than not having any system at all. These manual methods are usually very burdening for asset managers who are responsible for keeping asset records up-to-date and answering questions about assets whereabouts.
Chills down spine during auditing.
So lets start with IoT....
There are many types of sensors available, such as acceleration, temperature, humidity, pressure, and proximity sensors, which can be utilized for different use cases. The sensors are attached to assets in order to gather data, which is pushed to a cloud platform. This happens at a certain frequency (e.g. every 10 minutes) depending on the technology and settings used for the data transmission. The data is then analyzed and transformed into actionable insights about assets’ usage, location, environment, and condition.
IoT enabled Asset Management: Automation and Intelligence
In addition to the benefits asset management softwares provide, IoT-enabled asset management solutions add automation and intelligence to the system. IoT-enabled asset management solutions utilize IoT sensors, which allow companies to actively track specific information about their assets without any human involvement. These IoT sensors can be attached to assets instead of or along with more conventional asset tags (e.g. QR codes).
Use Cases for IoT-enabled Asset Management: Based on the gathered data, IoT-enabled asset management solutions can provide companies with real-time alerts, predictive analytics, automatic reporting, data insights and more. Here are some use cases for IoT-enabled asset management:
Locations: Automatic location data, asset tracing and geofencing solutions (e.g. utilizing GPS trackers).
Usage hours: Automatic tracking of usage hours and notifications about reached threshold values (e.g. acceleration sensors).
Warehouse inventory: Automatic warehouse inventories without any separate inventory events (e.g. BLE beacons).
Material flows: Automatic tracking and reporting of material flows (e.g. RFID tags).
Oracle IoT Smart Asset Management