It was only a handful of years ago when infrastructure piping, pumps, signs and electrical systems were managed via cumbersome scaled paper mapping systems. But with today’s digital asset inventory system, that information is available 24/7 right at your fingertips.

Paper systems were a good record keeping method in the past but not a convenient way to retrieve existing conditions of an asset easily. For example, if you are running a facility and you need to know when circuit #325 on the 16th floor of your building was installed, which room it’s in, on which wall, what model it is, what color it is, and what electrical grid it controls because it just blew up–it would be a heck of a lot easier to manage its repair by logging into a PC in your office or a mobile device in the field. Pressing a few buttons can give you access to the asset’s entire life history. In a municipal or utility authority setting, not only can you manage signage, fleet, pump stations, collection and distribution systems,—you can tailor the system to generate work orders to help track and close-out asset repairs, whether they are reoccurring maintenance work orders or corrective repairs.

A GIS asset management system sustains a wealth of knowledge about your assets and can be completely tailored to your needs or upgraded and modified as your needs grow. The initial switch-over from a space-eating flat file system to a streamlined GIS asset management program is going to take some time and persistence. But this initial time investment is worth its weight in gold, changing the way you manage your resources, equipment and assets going forward—better, more accurate and more economical. You’ll also find that it takes up a lot less space!

Suzanne Zitzman, GISP

Read more about GIS Asset Management in this month’s CIO Review, a story by Suzanne M. Zitzman, GISP and Director of GIS Services for Maser Consulting, entitled “GIS: The ‘Go To’ for Asset Management”