Your physical assets are continually changing—installing new units, retiring old or failed ones, and moving equipment between locations. This makes it hard to keep track of condition and maintenance costs.

Validating the data in your asset register allows you to accurately track reliability and total cost of ownership, so you can justify making proactive investments. When you gain visibility into downtime, maintenance costs, and remaining useful life, you can proactively replace individual assets at the optimal time for your customer experience and for your business.

Creating a work order is then as simple as scanning the QR code on an asset tag with the ServiceChannel App. Your provider will know what to repair and the parts to bring. Plus, ServiceChannel automatically routes work covered under warranty to the right provider—so you never miss out on free fixes.

By maximizing the efficiency of your equipment with an energy-saving preventive maintenance program, you can upgrade the most wasteful units in your capital plan, cut your emissions by tracking your refrigerant leaks, and automatically schedule follow-up inspections to verify the fix.

ServiceChannel Asset Management is there every step of the way to help you:

• Access complete history easily with a single source of truth
• Eliminate manual tracking and reduce errors
• Ensure asset data is current and validated with provider help via mobile
• Reduce unplanned downtime and lost revenue
• Avoid emergency repairs and warranty leakage
• Maintain compliance with changing regulations to prevent fines
• Forecast with more accuracy and maintain your budget with fewer surprises
• Plan and prioritize capital planning decisions
• Know when to repair vs. replace and predict failure more accurately
• Increase asset lifespan and return on capital
• Reduce the total cost of ownership
• Operate more sustainably; reduce energy use and GHG emissions
• Protect your customer experience
• Future-proof your facilities program

“Our members pay to shop with us, so we work to drive member delight. And what that means is ensuring we understand the conditions of all of our assets across the fleet so we know where to pinpoint investment.”  
– RJ Zanes, former Senior Director of Facilities at Sam’s Club

Phase 1: Plan

Define your goals and objectives

Before you get started, it’s important to establish what you want to achieve through asset management. Consider the following to help you focus on your top priorities.

Before you get started, it’s important to establish what you want to achieve through asset management. Consider the following to help you focus on your top priorities.

• Define what an asset is for your company: Do you want to include tables and chairs at a restaurant, a roof or a floor, a parking lot?
• Determine which assets are critical to your business: Do you have elevators, prep or safety equipment?
• Identify clear end goals: Do you need visibility into all assets or just the mission-critical assets that generate the most revenue? Do you want to implement IoT connected devices for equipment monitoring? Is sustainability a priority?
• Pinpoint the data you’ll need: Should it include a simple service history, warranty capture, capital planning, or parts purchasing? Are you seeking comprehensive data on total cost of ownership by asset, so you can make smarter capital planning decisions?

Get the most out of your ServiceChannel Asset Management 

We highly recommend asset tagging during the asset data collection process, as it’s fundamental to your overall strategy.

• Enhance visibility and control: Whether barcodes or RFID, asset tags provide a continuous, real-time view of asset location and status, helping you minimize misplacement and loss. 
• Improve inventory management: Tagging allows for quick, accurate inventory counts, replacing time-consuming manual processes, and reducing errors. 
• Audit and manage compliance with accuracy: Tags ensure data accuracy and consistency, which is vital for financial reporting, audits, and meeting regulatory requirements. 
• Make informed decisions: With detailed data on asset location, usage, and maintenance history, you can make better, data-driven decisions about procurement, repairs, and replacements. 
• Increase operational efficiency: Streamline processes, reduce time spent searching for assets, and improve maintenance scheduling. 
• Extend asset lifecycles: Track maintenance and breakdown history to implement effective preventive maintenance schedules. 

Ultimately, asset tags significantly reduce operational costs by preventing loss, and by optimizing asset use and maintenance. They also keep track of new assets—and old ones that are replaced. 

Determine your current position

First, you must identify the quality and accessibility of the data you already have. 

• Is the existing data complete? There’s a difference between accuracy and completeness. If you’re missing a few data points, consider enlisting the help of a vetted ServiceChannel partner, like XOi,to enrich the asset data.  
• Is the existing data accurate enough? “Accuracy” means you know exactly which assets are at each location with 100% confidence. Move forward if you’re more than 60% confident; if less, it probably makes sense to start over.
• Where does the data reside? Are you using Excel workbooks, an EAM system, Financial system, or a different platform? What kinds of financial reporting will you need to be able to do?

Then, you need to define your integration workflows.

• Do you have a single source of truth for asset data? Is it an Enterprise Asset Management system—and, if so, how accurate is the data? Integrate the EAM with ServiceChannel to ensure live updates of current data. If starting from scratch, vetted Asset Management Partners can help you collect, format, and upload asset data into ServiceChannel. 
• Do you have an IoT system in place: Is it scalable, proprietary or open-source, remotely accessible? If not, is your goal to implement IoT equipment monitoring devices? Customers with a high percentage of refrigerated assets typically are—and it’s important to design with that in mind to optimize the integration and ensure the correct information is synced. 

If you have questions, reach out to your Customer Success Manager.

Get ready to execute

Next, you’ll need to choose how you want to roll the program out—which locations, and in what order.

Plan a pilot project

Start with a pilot of less than 10 locations, so you can benefit from iterative learning to improve the process and collect the most accurate, complete data.

The locations involved in the pilot should be diverse—different regions, segments, and divisions, if possible—to get a more representative sample of your overall portfolio. If possible, they should also include a representative range of assets in your portfolio.

Set location number milestones and revisit your playbook at each milestone to optimize and make changes as needed.

Consider audit and tagging models

Self-managed	Provider-managed	Partner-managed
$	$$	$$$
Most time-consuming	Least accurate	Most accurate
You or your employees manually gather asset data onsite.	Identify reliable, high-performers who collect asset data at scale.	Choose from the vetted  ServiceChannel Partner Directory.

ServiceChannel Asset Management Partners:

• Datafleet and Bureau Veritas: Onsite asset data collection
• Camcode: Asset tracking label manufacturer
• XOi: HVAC asset data enrichment
• Ivueit: Crowdsourced visual verification with real-time photos
• Monaire and LoweConex:  HVAC and refrigeration sensors and controls automate work orders and reduce energy costs

Choose the right asset tags

Decide what type of adhesive you need, if the values will be visible, how the image will be embedded, and if they’re sufficiently wear-resistant.

Camcode is a vetted ServiceChannel partner that can help you determine the best tag for your needs.  

Set expectations for receiving data

You might receive data in the ServiceChannel template format, an unformatted flat file, or through APIs. You could upload it yourself, have a provider upload assets in bulk, or work with a vetted ServiceChannel partner.

Bureau Veritas or Data Fleet can help you determine what’s best for you, within your budget. API is the most dependable, which is a premium offering.

Plan for recurring audits to maintain data accuracy—this is not a “set it and forget it” process. Decide on the frequency of audits: quarterly, semi-annually, or annually. Most mature customers take an annual approach, just before tax season. 

Phase 2: Implement

Launch your pilot

During the pilot project, you’ll learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t, so you can refine the process for the wider company rollout.

• Determine a schedule for more efficient data collection and uploading.
• Ensure the data collected aligns with our goals (service history, capital planning, parts purchasing etc.).

Important: Load assets in the pilot project into the sandbox environment before loading into the live environment. This gives you the opportunity to clean up errors that prevent you from loading them, and it’s easier to review the data and the workflow to make changes. Once a work order is associated with an asset in the production environment, you won’t be able to remove that asset—so make sure everything looks okay in the sandbox environment first.

Roll out company-wide

Once you’ve completed the pilot project, you’ll be ready to fully launch across all of your locations.

• Receive and analyze the quality of the data, so you can make revisions as needed.
• Have an Admin review the data in the sandbox environment before it gets uploaded and after to make sure it’s all accurate before moving it into production.
• Cleaning up the data and uploading is much easier if it’s in the ServiceChannel template format.

Capture Refrigerant Data

ServiceChannel tracks ongoing regulatory changes, and we update the system to reflect those to make sure you remain compliant. There are some unique challenges involved in collecting refrigerant data.

• What assets are refrigerated: Not only refrigerators, but HVAC units must now be reported in many states.
• How many circuits: Type and amount of refrigerant in each circuit.

Talk to your ServiceChannel team to develop a plan for how to successfully collect it all. Xoi, a vetted ServiceChannel Partner, can help pull over 100 data points when you have asset models and serial numbers.

Phase 3: Optimize

Validate Asset Data

Accurate asset data means you can avoid unnecessary repair costs covered by warranties and ensure the most effective, efficient Planned Maintenance program possible. The goal is to ensure your asset data registry is identical to the physical assets at retail, and to validate total cost of ownership (TCO). When you move, replace, or sell assets, your data is suddenly out of date – so it’s important to validate asset data at regular intervals.

Your providers can easily validate and manage assets, as well as track asset movement during validation, while onsite using the ServiceChannel mobile app. If granted permission, they can access and edit ServiceChannel data and verify it or make changes. This helps ensure that the asset listed on the work order is the asset that’s actually being serviced.

Maintain asset data

As mentioned above, this is not a “set it and forget it” process – its success and usefulness depend on how current the data is kept. In an earlier step, you decided on the frequency of these audits: quarterly, semi-annually, or annually. Following through with a consistent frequency is crucial to the success of your overall program.

The ServiceChannel Platform provides insight into your asset portfolio through an embedded dashboard.

We recommend working with internal team members and vendors to validate assets and keep them up to date annually, ideally before tax time—so you have the most accurate data to report. There are a number of ways to validate assets. Whether it’s a single PM with 50 assets for validation purposes, or a repair work order with an asset on it, ServiceChannel is flexible can facilitate validation however you choose.

With the help of ServiceChannel data enrichment partners, such as XOi and Monaire, an IoT monitoring and sensor platform, you can enhance raw or existing data with additional internal and external information to improve quality, accuracy, and context for more informed decision-making.

Accurate, up-to-date asset data in ServiceChannel enables you to:

• Build and optimize your PM Program or spare parts management program
• Perform root cause & resolution analytics
• Optimize the repair process with suppliers
• Streamline regulatory compliance
• Plan around phasing out high Global Warming Potential (GWP) refrigerants
• Incorporate IoT integrations / connected devices
• Upgrade assets with new tech / features to stay competitive and functional
• Benchmark asset models to improve decision-making and performance
• Add assets to work orders and implement asset-first work order creation
• Set up asset spend reporting in ServiceChannel Analytics
• Integrate real-time condition monitoring with IoT connected devices
• Conduct proactive capital planning

Validating the data in your asset register allows you to gain visibility into downtime, maintenance costs, and remaining useful life, so you can proactively replace individual assets at the optimal time to protect your customer experience and achieve your desired business outcomes.

Get started

For help with tailoring this playbook into a plan that fits your business needs, reach out to your Customer Success or Account Manager for next steps.

 “With the level of detail ServiceChannel provides, I now have the data to show the finance and operations team that it may be time to replace a revenue-generating asset; this has made my life so much easier.”

– Jim Pearson, Maintenance Manager, Cal’s Convenience