Adding furniture to a space is an investment. Given normal usage (wear and tear), maintaining these assets can seem daunting. However, there are ways to recapture some of those dollars spent and ensure you’re maximizing your assets, simply by tracking your inventory.
There are a number of reasons to track your furniture. First, it’s important to make sure all of the pieces you’ve purchased have stayed within your company and not left the building. It will also support efforts to repurpose existing pieces, since you will be able to identify unused furnishings. In terms of monetary benefits, tracking it can allow you to more easily and accurately depreciate the assets for end of year accounting purposes.
Essentially, there are three primary ways to track furniture:
- Affix a barcode to each item. Then, using a scanning device and an inventory management program upload each item into a database. This application relies on skilled management of the scanning system inventory program. While useful, this is a very labor-intensive process.
- Install remote sensors to the furniture assets. While these sensors typically track how often an item is used, they can also be utilized to track inventory. Each sensor is tracked through a database, and it can be assigned to a furniture asset. This will allow you to track every asset, as well as its usage. This option will require some additional computer hardware to make the system work correctly.
- Create intelligent CAD drawings that can allow you to manually extract inventory from an entire floor or any given area within the floor plan. This process allows you to export those inventory lists into a database format in an effort to better manage them.
Depending on which method you choose to use, there are a few best practices to integrate into your asset management approach. Inventory checks should be done on a regular basis, such as monthly, quarterly or annually, depending on your specific requirements. You should diligently stick to the schedule that you establish. Not only is it more efficient, it will also improve the accuracy of the information. Longer, irregular intervals translate to more dollars spent, as reviews can be more time consuming.
To assist companies with furniture management, our team can provide continuous floor plan maintenance services, that can include furniture tracking. This service offers a number of benefits, including asset management, repurposing of assets into alternate space(s) or identifying where specific assets reside within your facility. Our approach will also improve the dexterity of the CAD plans and provide your facilities teams with more accurate floor plans to aid in future planning.
