What You Need to Improve Your Equipment Checkout Process

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In the business world, equipment checkout process and shared resources change hands like a hot stock on Wall Street— which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just really hard to track. Managers tasked with overseeing a high volume of assets that are checked out or rented at multiple locations don’t always have the tools they need to stay on top of things. The need to Implement an Asset Tracking system is a must.

One of the main obstacles in asset management is accountability — which has been a longstanding difficulty for companies and an even bigger nuisance for managers attempting to track down assets informally by following a trail of breadcrumbs (i.e messy email chains and long-winded excuses). Simply put, letting people off the hook has become a widespread occurrence affecting equipment management systems.

This scenario is one of several that we hear most often from our customers:

Jim from Building D checked out four tablets for his team to work on a project by writing down his employee ID and the date on a log sheet in the storage room. When physical inventory is performed at the end of the quarter, only 1 of 4 tablets has been returned and the blame game ensues.

Sure, Jim should be on the hook for returning the other three, but he assumed his teammates (who aren’t on the log sheet) would have been responsible enough to return the unaccounted for devices. Now Jim and/or the equipment manager must waste valuable time trying to recover the assets without a sophisticated system in place.

There will always be employees that don’t buy-in to the system and others that forget the procedures, but at the end of the quarter, it’s employers that are left footing the bill for missing assets. In general, we find that companies big and small lack of true accountability of their equipment checked-out, the check-in process.

The good news is that ASAP Systems wants to help fix things. The newly enhanced equipment tracking solution now enables users to create a transaction receipt at ‘check-in’ or ‘check-out’. This feature adds a layer of accountability and traceability to your equipment checkout process by providing physical proof of checkout in addition to the digital receipt logged in the system. Paper receipts might be going extinct in grocery stores and retail shops, but for asset tracking systems they still serve a practical purpose.

Equipment Checkout Process

Try to find fixed asset management software that lets you check out or assign items in bundles to groups of people so that you can associate each person in the group with the set of assets. When physical inventory is performed, or equipment is due to be returned, all accountable parties can be ascertained. Functionality like this would’ve been clutch to have in the example above.

Another way to improve your checkout process is with the ability to grant access to team members and control their level of access to the system. Admins and standard users can set up as many “view-only” or “checkout-only” users to ensure everyone involved in a project may see the available equipment and reserve it in a self-service fashion. When employees and management receive the flexibility and visibility they desire, asset management goes from being a mess to success.