Watch your assets: material and product inventories aren't the only assets you need to manage. Here's how to find savings managing facilities and their contents--including material handling fleets and over-the-road vehicles.(technology)

Transportation & Distribution, August, 2003 by Katz, Jonathan

Asset management and maintenance are major concerns in today's far-flung supply chains. Company-owned assets range from facilities and their contents, to the equipment fleets used to manage production and logistics functions. Asset and maintenance management are a new frontier for cost management in many organizations because they are areas that are often neglected, or the costs they generate are nearly invisible in the way they are reported.

Here are examples of how various organizations tamed asset management issues, improved maintenance and delivered huge savings. When defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. won a $3 billion grant from NASA, it also inherited management of a huge headache. Lockheed's task was to consolidate the space agency's 26...

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