See these photos? They were taken on-site at a client in the construction industry to illustrate how information management is everywhere – including at an equipment and parts storage yard that on the surface seems to be as far removed from IT as you can get.
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The thing is, each one of these pieces of equipment, and each one of these parts, has metadata associated with it that must be properly managed if the company is to efficiently find and utilize it: manufacturer, supplier, lot number, serial number, size and specification, job identifier, etc. These are critical to everything from purchasing to billing, fabrication to inspection, design to audit, so the cost of not getting the tagging right – or right enough – is HUGE in terms of time, money, and potential liability.
If you haven’t yet, or haven’t recently, looked at all your equipment and parts – the virtual and the physical – then it’s time you did so, for regardless of the market sector you’re in (financial services, health care, education, utilities, manufacturing, oil and gas, etc.), you almost certainly are costing yourself business value. And if my recent consulting experiences are any guide, you’re at risk of falling behind as your competitors get on the stick.