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Do you know somebody that just refuses to replace their vehicle, despite the fact it seems to need an oil change, headlamp, sparkplug or other form of maintenance every week? Are you the friend that won’t replace that vehicle? Let’s think about how much money it’s costing per week to repair and maintain that car (probably seems small, but it adds up)! Now let’s think about the price of a new car, and how much money you may recoup if you sell or scrap the old car. Now if you are a fleet manager, you have hundreds or thousands of vehicles that you have to consider their maintenance costs, replacement costs and optimal life-cycles. Is your head starting to swim with all of the numbers yet? No fear! Effective capital asset management software will help you perform all of these analyses and more, regardless of what kind of assets you maintain. Here are some of the benefits of this solution:

  1. Prioritizes replacements to allocate scarce capital budgets and minimize future maintenance costs

Following the age-old question, “How do I know when to replace my asset?” comes the solution: a life-cycle cost analysis can help to illustrate the optimal replacement cost of an asset.

Instead of trying to crunch the hundreds of variables and numbers yourself, an effective software system would create a comprehensive analysis quickly to allow you to comfortably make decisions when you need to. By replacing an asset at its optimal time, you can maximize your ROI by not paying for excessive maintenance.

  1. Captures important data for analysis and reporting to streamline common challenges, like: analytics, planning and budgeting, procurement and remarketing

A capital asset management system could efficiently work in tandem to help streamline your processes so that a single source of information populates as much as possible. With the system, your data can be integrated to reduce manual entry errors and out-of-sync data. Automating the reconciliation process helps to free up your time for more important tasks, but don’t forget that you can have the system highlight discrepancies for manual review!

  1. Determines the usefulness of assets and asset types

Besides helping to analyze the optimal life-cycles of assets and when they should be replaced, a capital asset management system can help you determine if an asset or type of asset you have been using is worth continued use. For example, if your fleet uses similar pickup trucks from both Manufacturer A and Manufacturer B, but the system has recorded volumes of data that indicate the trucks from B are getting lower mileage, require more maintenance and have shorter asset life-cycles, you may be able to determine that they are no longer worth purchasing.

  1. Works independently of a fleet’s maintenance management application (but can typically integrate)

An effective capital asset management solution is able to be used by itself to analyze asset life-cycles and other cost-based determinations, but it has the ability to be fully integrated with fleet and fuel management software solutions. In one centralized database, you can access all aspects of your managed assets and make business decisions based on a comprehensive knowledge of them.

Why throw any more money at assets that need to be replaced anyway? Let modern technology, such as capital asset management software, show you optimal life-cycles for your fleet assets.