6 Ways to Mobilize Asset Management Operations
It's no secret that organizations continue to face various challenges when it comes to managing their assets. One of the biggest tasks is providing operations professionals with what they need to quickly and efficiently tackle the day-to-day and long-term demands of business.
Curious how you can create a streamlined process for mobilizing your asset management operations?
Read on!
1. Prioritize
If you are thinking about mobilization, your organization should already clearly understand needs versus wants. An important part of prioritization includes diving deep into your current state of operations.
- These questions can help you determine top-tier needs versus wants:
- How is communication handled while team members are on-site?
- How are workflows established?
- Are tasks automated, and if not, who is responsible for them?
- Provide your team with a framework for prioritization; how will their time be utilized, and what resources will they require?
Establishing a clear yet dynamic prioritization system is crucial for strategic mobilization (and will just help you get things done).
2. Collaborate
Even if you’re responsible for managing field representatives working on seemingly siloed jobs, helping your team sync up and strategize can be a lucrative way to share best practices. If you’re trying to mobilize, build in ways to collaborate.
Say you have two jobs within a short distance from each other and another across town. If your crews know that one group can tackle the two near ones and a second can handle the task further away, your team can get more done in less time (and spend less money traveling between sites).
When you provide your employees with the tools they need to work efficiently from wherever they are, it’s easy for remote and on-site team members to come together. With trust that’s backed by collaboration and the right tools to get the job done, you can create a culture of transparency where employees feel valued — and the work is completed in a timely and cost-effective way.
3. Communicate
Communication is critical to mobilization. Teams that can communicate quickly and fluidly develop clear goals and understand business processes, helping them perform at their best — even when adapting to changing circumstances.
To build a cohesive and motivated team, everyone must have access to the information they need to get their jobs done. With the right tools, your team can:
- Distribute workloads to people with more bandwidth
- Stay on top of maintenance and other potentially costly issues
- Understand how their daily tasks fit into longer-term organizational goals
- Establish accountability and foster collaboration
A reliable cross-functional communication platform allows employees working from any location to productively analyze issues and develop solutions as a team.
4. Distribute
Once you build a strong pillar of communication, you can distribute the workload across your teams. Keep in mind, successful delegation relies on much more than simply assigning jobs. Distribution means pairing each individual’s strengths with your organizational data and matching employees to the tasks that will optimize their efforts for the greater whole.
Whether you are monitoring a city-wide public works issue or trying to effectively utilize your fleet of delivery trucks, chances are you don’t need to be out in the field to make smart business decisions for your organization. You do, however, need to ensure that everyone understands the “why” of what they are doing. Providing employees with the information and context they need up front can help reduce extra steps or work later.
Additionally, with defined protocols and best practices, documentation requirements, and frequent communication, you and your operations team can divide and conquer any list of tasks or repairs. Also, once priorities are crystal clear, you can assign responsibilities and understand who is accountable for what.
Identifying and communicating needs and deadlines from contributors across teams helps you get everyone on the same page. Don’t forget to outline the following:
- Key decision-makers and stakeholders
- How responsibility is determined for identifying and executing major processes
- What the procedure is for documenting completed tasks and projects
Clear delineation of roles and responsibilities can help avoid confusion or costly missteps and free leadership to focus on more high-level objectives — while boosting confidence that the job will get done.
5. Incentivize
For managers looking to motivate employees, recognizing your team's efforts can go a long way in ensuring that operations continue to run efficiently. Focusing on goals and incentivizing milestones allows you to mobilize your team for success.
It's also a great method for keeping every employee on task, even when the tasks go beyond the job description.
Does a project list determine your day-to-day? Using a cloud-based workforce management tool can allow team members to complete off-site jobs efficiently while sharing real-time data with other workers and those back at base.
Trouble getting buy-in from your team for using new tech? What if they knew they could go home for the day once all their tasks were completed? This is just one way to help encourage the use of a new tool.
If you can adjust assignments in response to situational conditions (like grouping by location or avoiding conflicts that could slow down the flow of work), you can boost the productivity of your employees. With higher-functioning employees, you have more opportunities to reward them for a job well done — and who doesn’t like a little acknowledgment for hard work?
6. Innovate
Maximizing the potential of your operations team should go beyond checking tasks off a list.
Innovation isn’t simply adding tech to a problem. However, the right solution paired with changing how you operate or think about problem-solving can save your organization money in the long run and help foster a workplace where people like showing up each day.
By shifting to an asset management tool for store maintenance, for example, teams can optimize their internal management process. A few other ways to shift your thinking include:
- Documenting everything to identify patterns and opportunities for improvements
- Stop wasting time and money on unnecessary travel or steps
- Better tracking of inventory to know what you have — and what you’ll need
- Getting ahead of repair schedules and maintenance to save money
The word “innovation” can sound scary but consider the time and resources you can save when your operations teams move their processes online and shift from reactive to proactive decision-making.
Regardless of the scope or scale of your enterprise, operational mobilization begins with a close look at the foundation and ends with a shift in thinking. The right tools and software can help you manage your assets more efficiently and cost-effectively — and enable your teams to work smarter, not harder, as the kids say.
