Asset lifecycle management
Asset lifecycle management is the practice of managing equipment deliberately at every stage — from specifying and buying it through use and maintenance to disposal.
Asset lifecycle management is the practice of managing equipment deliberately at every stage — from specifying and buying it through use and maintenance to disposal.
← Equipment management glossary
Also called: equipment lifecycle management, ALM.
Plan — deciding what is needed, and whether you already own something that would do. Acquire — purchase or lease, and getting the item into the register before it disappears into use. Operate — the long middle, where custody, location and utilisation are tracked. Maintain — servicing, repairs and condition, running in parallel with operation rather than after it. Dispose — retirement, sale, recycling or write-off, with the record closed rather than abandoned.
Registers rot at the end, not the beginning. Equipment is enthusiastically added and quietly forgotten when it is scrapped, so the register slowly fills with items that no longer exist. This is the single most common reason an inventory becomes untrusted.
Disposal also carries obligations that outlive the equipment: data destruction on anything with storage, regulated disposal for batteries and refrigerants, and evidence of both for auditors. A disposal record is worth more than the item was.
Purchase price is usually the smaller half. TCO adds consumables, servicing and repairs, downtime cost, insurance, storage, training, and disposal — offset by whatever it sells for at the end.
You cannot calculate it without a history per item, which is the practical argument for lifecycle tracking: it is what turns "this machine feels expensive" into a number that can be compared against the alternative.
Managing only the purchase and ignoring the rest means replacement decisions are made on gut feel, and registers fill up with equipment that was scrapped years ago.
Itefy holds each item's whole life in one record — purchase details, bookings, checkouts, condition, repairs and costs — through to archiving on disposal. Read more.
Plan, acquire, operate, maintain and dispose. Operate and maintain run in parallel rather than in sequence, and disposal is the stage most often skipped — which is why registers accumulate equipment that no longer exists.
Purchase price plus consumables, servicing, repairs, downtime, insurance, storage, training and disposal, less residual sale value. For most equipment the purchase price is the smaller part of the total.
Equipment depreciation is the accounting method for spreading an item's cost across the years it is expected to be useful, rather than expensing it all at purchase.
DefinitionPreventive maintenance is servicing equipment on a planned schedule — by time or by usage — to reduce the chance of it failing unexpectedly in use.
DefinitionAn equipment condition report is a dated record of the physical and working state of a specific item, used to track deterioration and settle damage questions.
DefinitionEquipment management is the practice of tracking what equipment an organisation owns, where it is, who has it, and what condition it is in — across its whole working life.
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