The cost of Tracking Is Holding Back Your Business

Traditional asset tracking methods are failing modern businesses because they cost too much. The high cost stops companies from tracking their assets effectively and forces them to limit tracking to just a handful of assets. This leads to inefficiencies and increased costs. At FORMATION, we offer a scalable, cost-effective solution that can revolutionize your asset management. But why is asset tracking so crucial, and how can it benefit your business?

What is asset tracking?

Assets are things that are in some way valuable or important to companies. You can think of tools, goods, products, equipment, vehicles, materials, etc. Asset tracking is simply the process of keeping track of where assets are. There are many different ways to do this of course and most companies do at least some minimal form of keeping track of their assets for bookkeeping, inventory management, compliance, and other business reasons. Traditionally this means keeping a record of where things are stored in terms of shelf numbers, storage rooms and halls, etc. and making sure those records are kept up to date.

Modern technology enables more efficient, lower cost, and more convenient ways of keeping track of assets. This vastly increases the scale and frequency of tracking. You can track many more things more often. But why would you do that?

Why Asset Tracking is Valuable

More effective asset tracking means you are gathering more data and this is essential for improving operational efficiency and reducing costs. Many companies do not track their assets effectively. They often use cumbersome and outdated paper-based methods and other ad-hoc methods. This leads to inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date information. This lack of effective tracking can lead to significant time and resource wastage.

FORMATION’s asset tracking provides several benefits:

• Search Efficiency: Quickly locating tools and goods; reduce downtime and increase productivity. Waste less time finding things.
• Operational Insights: Identify process bottlenecks and optimize your workflow using visual heatmaps, insights from dashboards, and asset tracking trails on the map.
• Knowledge Sharing: Share information about what you are tracking; access rich media, notes, photos, and other documentation.
• Situational Awareness: The FORMATION map increases situation awareness in your team. They can see at a glance where to go, what needs doing, and where the action is. This is also perfect for onboarding new people, or making your people more productive in unfamiliar environments.
• Accountability and Auditing: Access detailed logs about your assets. Where has it been, who handled it, etc. Auditing logs enable you to diagnose when things go wrong, allow you to take corrective action earlier, and reduces cost for providing critical information needed for legal or business compliance.

Cost-effective tracking

Different tracking technologies offer varying levels of accuracy, update frequency, and cost. They each have their pros and cons. The pyramid above illustrates that QR Code Tags are the most scalable way to track assets, by far. For the price of a simple printed QR Code, you can tag & track anything anywhere in the world. This requires no new infrastructure, it can be done with a simple smart-phone, it doesn’t even require any software installation. Anyone can track anything with QR codes.

The further up you go in the pyramid, the more expensive and complicated it gets. And while the position accuracy improves, you also get some limitations. For example, you need to have infrastructure in your facilities to support tracking. And the trackers don’t work if you go out of range of that infrastructure. Some trackers are powered and require a battery that runs out. Depending on the type of tracker, the trackers can also be costly. And like with all hardware, maintenance is required, there are numerous challenges in this space.

This upfront friction stops a lot of asset tracking projects dead in their tracks. Companies opt out of expensive tracking technologies that they can’t afford or limit their use to only a handful of assets, which defeats the purpose.

But what about everything else? Why track only a few hundred assets when you have millions? Our key point is that you should be tracking everything everywhere to the best of your abilities to get the most value out of asset tracking. Don’t allow yourself to be limited by expensive tracking technology.

The FORMATION approach is to not force our customers into making upfront expensive choices. You can sign up now, get started and be tracking all your assets. This puts you in a position to then add other tracking solutions as needed where and when it makes sense to do so. With FORMATION, you can always use QR Code Tags. As many as you need. Our supply is infinite. If it matters to you, we’ll track it for you.

Once you are tracking your assets, are getting the value, and you want to level up your experience, we support a variety of technologies from the pyramid above via plugins. You can use this to get better accuracy and automated tracking for some of your assets. But for everything else, QR Code Tags provide you a baseline that you currently don’t have.

Discover the benefits of asset tracking and sign up now.