Anyone who has served in the U.S. Army knows about equipment layouts. Essentially, everyone takes all their stuff, and puts each item on the ground in a particular pattern to be inventoried.
For example, an individual solider might lay down a poncho and empty out the contents of his rucksack on it. Then everyone would put the canteen in the bottom-right and the compass in the top-right and so on so everyone’s pile of stuff looked the same. This allows leadership to quickly inventory while walking by.
The process scales up to the unit level as well. Behind four individual ponchos of gear, you might see all the items that belong to the M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank behind them. That scene would be repeated four times for the platoon, and then repeated three times for the Company or Troop.
Doing layouts is notoriously tedious and one is conducted every time a new leader assumes command.
Once everything is laid out and everyone is satisfied, the paperwork began. DA Form 2062 is the personal hand receipt for this process. Every single piece of equipment in the Army is assigned to someone who is responsible for that gear.
Managing Business Assets like Army Equipment
These layouts are an inventory audit of all company assets and require 100% accountability. They had a standard and right or wrong, it was the process. Although tedious, they are easy to conduct. Nothing in the process is remarkable or unique. Yet, we never see this in the business world.
Why aren’t we doing anything like these inventory layouts for the assets in our companies when it’s our money and our careers at stake?
Every office in every company has corporate assets that further their mission and should be managed. Within every enterprise, such questions are asked all the time:
- Who is “signed for” the $3,000 printer?
When was the last inventory audit conducted?
Is there an SOP on how those audits are performed?
Are the roles and responsibilities known?
Does anybody know where the 10 new monitors we just received are located?
In the corporate world, this is classic asset management and facilities management. These practices can save you countless dollars if done properly and cost you as much if done poorly. And that’s before we even start talking about sensitive corporate assets such as proprietary IP and company secrets.
Q: How much would it cost a software company if they lost their source code?
A: The whole company.
At Stave, we wanted to know how we could solve these problems by extending the ServiceNow cloud platform. That’s why we developed Stave AssetPath. The app allows any organization on the ServiceNow platform to gain the 100% visibility into its assets and inventory that the Army gets via equipment layouts.
AssetPath Features:
- Asset Commissioning
- Condition-based Monitoring
- Asset Chain-of-Custody and Transfer
- Predictive Maintenance
- Asset Decommissioning and Disposition
- Custom Reports and Dashboards
Check out the full AssetPath feature set and try it for free in our Demo Center today.
