Equipment asset management
Know where your assets are,
and what has happened to them
Your equipment is spread across a territory. People work on it. As for the history, it lives in notebooks, emails and the heads of two or three people. I design your asset register, then build the tools for it.
The starting point
It is not the inventory
that is missing. It is the history
Almost every organisation that manages equipment has an inventory somewhere: a spreadsheet, an annotated paper plan, an export from three years ago. What is missing is the rest of the story — who visited, when, what was changed, what was reported and never dealt with.
The consequences are always the same. A team goes out to a piece of equipment that was already repaired the week before. A fault reported by a member of the public gets lost between three mailboxes. A part is ordered twice. And when a renewal budget has to be defended, nobody can say how many times a given type of equipment has failed.
None of this is solved by buying one more piece of software. It is solved by deciding what counts as an asset in your organisation, what is tracked, what is counted — then by building the tools around that decision.
It is the intervention that creates the history, and the history that gives the register its value.
Fit
If any one of the three is missing, this is not the tool you need — and I will tell you so before I waste your time.
Three conditions,
and they go together
Physical equipment
Objects you can go and see, touch, replace. A portfolio of software licences can be managed perfectly well without a map.
Spread across a territory
An asset base concentrated on a single site does not need geolocation: a good list is enough. It is the dispersion that makes the map useful, because you plan a round by looking at an area rather than by filtering a spreadsheet.
People work on it
It is the intervention that creates the history, and the history that gives the register its value. An inventory that nobody updates is wrong again within eighteen months.
Uses
Four uses that support
one another
The tooling can cover just one of them. But it is the way they follow on from each other that produces the history: a report becomes an intervention, which becomes a line of history, which becomes a budget argument.
- Reporting
- A report from a phone, with no account to create, located, time-stamped, with a photo. It lands in a triage queue — not straight into the schedule — requests about the same piece of equipment are grouped together, and the person who reported it is kept informed. Each request keeps a dated record, including the ones you decide not to act on.
- Interventions
- Triage, assignment, scheduling, then the field record: parts fitted, time spent, condition found. Repeat interventions become visible — the equipment that needs replacing flags itself — and a renewal budget can at last be defended with figures.
- Inventory
- The asset base on a map, with your own divisions: sectors, municipalities, contract lots. Bringing in the existing spreadsheets is part of the work, and the base maps are your own if you have any.
- Field
- Mobile coverage often stops where the equipment begins. The offline write cycle is in production in the mapping library I publish: entries recorded locally, queued, replayed without duplicates. Its integration on the Odoo side is part of the suite, currently being finalised.
Before the tool
A badly segmented asset base produces
a tool nobody uses
This is the part that vendors pass over in silence, and it is the one that decides everything. A column and its lantern: one asset or two? A section of network: where does it start? A cabinet feeding thirty light points: what is attached to what?
These decisions are not theoretical. They determine what you will be able to count, and therefore what you will be able to defend. Badly framed, they produce a tool that teams work around within three months, and an inventory nobody trusts.
So that is where I start: defining with you what counts as an asset in your organisation, what is tracked, what is counted, and who is accountable for it. Only then do we build the tools — and the tool resembles your line of work rather than your neighbour's.
This is exactly the work done for SIDELEC's street lighting diagnosis →
Sectors
Where the three conditions are met
This list illustrates the criterion, it does not replace it. A sector left off the list is not a sector ruled out.
Networks and public space
- Networks: water, sewerage, electricity, lighting, telecoms.
- Local authorities: street furniture, technical assets, public spaces.
- Green spaces and street trees.
Industry and operations
- Maintenance of equipment installed at third-party sites.
- Transport and logistics.
- Construction, agriculture and viticulture.
- Mining and oil.
Demo
See it working rather
than read a brochure
Two test instances run permanently: one on a sample asset base, the other on a street lighting network. You can create an intervention and follow a report through. It is the best way to judge the usability and the real pace of work.
Questions
What people ask me about asset management
Let's talk about your assets
Describe in a few lines what you manage, roughly how many assets, and who works on them. I reply within 48 hours, demo access included.