There’s nothing more irritating for a classroom than to find
that very valuable equipment has gone inexplicably missing.
At a time when schools are becoming harder and harder pressed to adequately
provide for the academic needs of all their students losing valuable equipment can be a terrible blow.
Currently a lot
of the equipment that schools need to conduct their business isn’t cheap. So
coming up with effective asset tracking systems is crucial if you wish to
maintain your school’s hold on its assets.
Sadly lost equipment isn’t exactly a rare occurrence either. A
study conducted by the School of Education Admission found that as many as four
fifths of schools have, at some point through the year, will suffer from theft
of school equipment.
Often, these thefts were from the school’s ICT department,
and more occasionally the audio-visual hardware from media studies classes.
Naturally this equipment is very expensive to replace, and
its loss can also be damaging to the students whose courses rely on access to
that equipment.
It’s hard to learn about computer technology without ready access
to a computer, after all.
Of course keeping track of your school’s laptops,
microscopes and video recording equipment isn’t something you can do in a day.
It takes a lot of work, effort, and not a small amount of proper financial
investment as well.
Asset Tracking Systems Made Easy
The easiest way a school can keep track of where its
equipment is going is to properly catalogue and record the things it has to
begin with.
One way this can be achieved is to give each piece of equipment its
own serial identification number, which would be unique to that item. To make
things easier, you can also give that equipment tamper-proof number ID tags to
further improve their security and reduce the chances of theft.
It may be an idea to create the system in such a way that
objects are not only divided by type, but also by department and storage area
as well.
So, for example, if you have a video projector that’s used by the
science department in Building Two, you could have a three-part code that
reflects all this information.
Suddenly it’s become tremendously easier to
figure out where everything is supposed to fit in, which also helps prevent
accidental claims of theft when, in fact, a piece of equipment was simply
returned to the wrong storage cupboard.
This saves on valuable time and frayed
nerves.
Furthermore, you can also give each piece of equipment its
own unique barcode. This means that when equipment is taken out, it can be
recorded on a computer database as well as a physical logbook for greater
accuracy in bookkeeping.
Of course asset tracking systems aren’t any good if you pay
no attention to where the assets in question are being moved to.
Whenever
equipment is removed from the storage cupboard, make sure that the
identification tag is noted and marked off on a register, with a note detailing
when it was borrowed, by whom and for how long.
This can be used, then, to
track where the equipment was last held before it went missing.
Protect Your School’s Assets
No solution is entirely fool proof.
One of the main quirks
of using security ID tags for valuable equipment is that it’s meant to deter
thieves, but this doesn’t always work as planned.
Instead, asset tracking
systems can be used to get an idea of when items when missing and where they
could have gone, all of which can greatly speed up the process by which it can
be safely returned.
