Asset Inventory in the Cloud
Today we have prepared another example of digitizing a process into a business system directly from practice, which is used for inventorying company assets. The solution is based on the asset inventory basics of the standard SAP Asset Management (AM) module, where assets can be managed for record-keeping and financial accounting purposes.
Our customer has a large number of assets spread over many locations, which are registered to specific employees. Since tangible assets make up a huge part of the company’s value, effective record keeping, maintenance and regular inventory of assets is an important part of running an efficient business.
The customer had a requirement to get the asset management and control processes into a single system that would be integrated with all data sources and be as automated as possible. The customer needed to build a new system mainly because the current inventory process was very complex. In the past, he had to transfer asset information from multiple information systems, consolidate it, generate reports, distribute them by mail, then manually check all assets, write the results on paper, send the changes back, and finally laboriously update the changes in the source IS.
With the new solution, all of these manual activities have been eliminated. It was decided that all asset data will be primarily in one system only, namely SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud. The entire inventory process will be done in a single FAIN BTP solution, which is the cloud version of the popular FAIN solution. In the new solution, the customer will create lists of assets, assign commissions, activate data collection with a central notification tool. The asset data collection itself will be done in two ways. Most of the assets will be checked using the SAP BTP cloud portal directly by the employees who have the assets assigned. The remaining assets will be physically checked centrally using the mobile app and by retrieving QR codes that tag the assets. The processing of the result of the data collection from both sources will be done by the asset manager who will prepare the basis for approval and evaluation for the inventory committee. The result reports are available as PDF documents that can be created or archived at any time. Once the inventory has been approved and closed, the system automatically updates all changed data directly to the asset cards in SAP S/4HANA. The solution also included the automatic transfer of part of the assets to third-party SW via the cloud-based SAP Integration Suite platform.
This way, the customer gets a single and comprehensive Cloud tool that not only guides them through the entire inventory process, but some of the features, such as the list of own assets, will be used throughout the year. Today, no employee will be surprised by what assets and in what condition they are assigned.
The entire solution is fully integrated into the customer’s SAP Cloud environment and will therefore require only minimal effort to operate. As the solution is built on cloud solutions, it will provide the customer with all the benefits that the cloud brings while maintaining the requirement for high security of the solution.
