Which direction is your asset management reporting heading?

Building a house without a design doesn’t sound very wise. The same applies to your asset management reports. If you don’t define in advance what a report should look like, it’s not clear where you’re going, and you can’t create a realistic budget or a good plan. There is a high probability that your focus will shift during the project due to evolving insights – resulting in extra work and delays. Therefore, it is important to first create a functional design for your reports before you start developing them. Whether it concerns a report that provides insight into the performance or integrity of an asset, the handling of work orders, or your purchase discounts – a functional design undoubtedly leads to the best result.

Parties and interests clearly in view

In a functional design, you record all sorts of details about the report you have in mind. What do you want to achieve with it? What information do you want to display? To whom and how? This ensures clarity for all parties involved in the project. First of all, that is the client, or perhaps there are several clients. Because there may of course be different departments that want a certain report, possibly with conflicting interests and needs. This makes the development of a solution in a functional design even more important. In addition to the client(s), there are the suppliers, and there are often more than one. For example, you may want to unlock data from different software systems in your report or you may be dealing with different self-employed people. The functional design states which parties all play a role and what they do within the project.

Description of all requirements for your asset management reporting

Basis for testing and development

Visualizing works: create prototypes of your asset management reports

An important step precedes development and testing, and that is prototyping. The functional design already includes images that show what the report components will look like. With a prototype, you further visualize an asset management report so that all those involved have a good idea of the intended end result. This can be done in Excel or Paint and is therefore not complicated. A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, and that certainly applies here. With a prototype, people often only really understand what is coming. Together with all those involved, you can validate whether the report meets everyone’s wishes. Just as for determining the requirements, a workshop also works well for creating and validating a prototype.

Unlocking ideas

A functional design is not only a validation tool to ensure that what is being built is actually what the parties involved have in mind. Creating such a design stimulates the thinking process about a report and gives people ideas about how things can also be done. In every phase of the process it is possible to include changes and thus channel progressive insight in a good way.

Correct insights

At Gemba, we always recommend creating a functional design for a new asset management report. This prevents disappointment, budget overruns and long lead times and results in satisfied users who get the right insights. We are happy to help you with every step in the process.