Education is a billion-dollar sector that is thriving now more than ever before. With student enrollment rapidly increasing, enough educational resources are required to ensure optimum teaching quality. This is why school districts must track a plethora of inventory and digital assets not only across locations but also among individual pupils.
Every school has various high-value assets that are utilized for a variety of reasons. Every school need a specialized and custom-made school asset management system to keep track of these assets. Between cleaning materials, teaching equipment, transportation vehicles, furniture, and other consumables, school authorities must keep track of every item and guarantee it functions properly.
In this blog we will discuss the following:
- What is a school asset management system?
- Why asset management systems are gaining popularity in schools
- Working principle of a school asset management system
- Benefits of employing a school asset management system
What is a School Asset Management System?
Asset management can be defined as the process of inventorying, recording, and evaluating asset utility to improve the utility of a certain asset in order to achieve an organization’s aim. Asset management is an endeavour to maximise the potential of a certain asset in order to meet an organization’s objective, mission, and vision.
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Benefits of School Inventory Management in the Modern Educational System
The advantages of employing a school asset management system in schools include:
- Accurate Record Keeping
The correct school asset management software can give the functionality required to create a centralised data repository for all critical assets. This is particularly critical for data protection and backup in the event of a fire or damage, which can ruin a paper-based traditional asset management system and cause issues and delays when processing insurance claims.
- Avoiding Duplicate Assets
Having access to the school’s asset register can help you save money on stuff that is already on hand. For example, a teacher may request that more seats be added to their classroom. However, by reviewing the data, they can discover that a lot of chairs are not being used in other departments. Instead of acquiring additional chairs, they can move them from one function to another where they will be more useful.
- Reduce Asset Theft
Because school operations must adhere to a limited budget, replacing lost or stolen assets can be costly. However, by utilising school inventory tracking and tagging functions of the school asset management system, theft of critical educational assets can be prevented.
- Stick to Budgets
Schools can manage and track expenditure requests from each academic department by using the correct technologies. This may be trays and silverware from the school cafe or more books and workstations from library workers. Whatever the need, these demands must be in line with the budget.
Why are Educational Institutes Moving Towards Asset Management Systems?
Despite this rapid expansion, most educational institutions continue to use pen and paper or excel sheets to keep track of asset movements. Manual school asset management practices make no sense in an era when internet learning is supplanting traditional classroom instruction.
Traditional school asset management systems can create a slew of administrative issues for schools. Here are some of the most fundamental ones:
- Ineffective Classroom Operations
If each campus includes about 50 classes, with 30 pupils in each. As a result, the 1:1 technique necessitates tracking around various teaching tools, projectors, and furniture objects linked with a class.
You may be unable to present the appropriate assets in the appropriate classroom before the lecture begins. This might cause disruptions in your classroom activities, resulting in inefficient school admin operations and poor student outcomes.
- Inefficient Budgeting
Traditional asset tracking systems make it difficult to detect items that fail frequently and bring no value to school operations. Even if one tries, arriving at the book value of many assets requires lengthy and difficult calculations. As a result, schools frequently find overstocked products they do not really need.
The majority of these limited funds are frequently spent by school administration on replacing lost assets or repairing equipment. Inappropriate use of finances may lead to angry stakeholders and a suspension in funding supply.
- Inaccurate Asset Tracking
Paper logs and spreadsheets pose a significant risk to information accuracy. In most circumstances, you are unaware of the real-time scenario because you are manually recording data on the location and status of each item. There could be cases of phantom assets, which are assets that exist in your records but are truly lost.
What are the Working Principles of a School Asset Management System?
A good school asset management system must incorporate some basic working principles. These are broadly categorized as:
- Sustainable
When a school adopts good asset management, it is also embracing long-term thinking, which is not usually a business goal. However, in order for a school’s assets to provide the most value, they must be managed in a sustainable manner.
- Holistic
An organisation must analyse the interplay of its many asset kinds. An organisation must consider how assets interact effectively and what contributions they make inside their own asset systems. They must also grasp the various asset life cycle phases and their associated operations.
- Optimal
The ultimate goal of efficient asset management is optimization, or discovering and implementing the best feasible value compromise between conflicting goals and circumstances. A school asset management system considers the costs, benefits, risks, and performance aspects linked to assets throughout their life cycle and compares them to make decisions about how to use the assets.
- Risk-Based
Making risk visible is critical to an organization’s existence. Enterprises that fail to account for risk in asset management endanger not only the assets themselves but also the organization’s overall operations. Identifying possible risks and their related costs and benefits will assist companies in establishing priorities and allocating resources and expenses appropriately.
FAQ
What are the examples of school asset inventory?
Buses, ACs, lights, educational equipment, maps, cricket bats, balls, basketball nets, and other items are included in the School Asset Inventory.
How do you manage school asset inventory?
Here are some best practices for creating an asset inventory that you should follow.
- Make an idea of the size of your inventory.
- Determine who will be responsible for inventory management.
- Grasp the fundamentals of asset tracking.
- Make use of the appropriate software.
