Consider how technology is benefiting education, and your first thoughts will be of classrooms and research. But behind the scenes, day-to-day operations involve mundane, but equally important, tangible assets that must be purchased, tracked or maintained. Technology is the key to managing it all with accuracy and efficiency.
Around an instrumented campus or physical plant, wired and wireless connections pick up signals from digital sensors and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. They collect usage, temperatures, mileage and other input to feed into data acquisition and monitoring tools, digital sensors and global positioning systems.
With asset management for education from IBM, this cacophony of data is collected in a central repository, where it is analyzed and shared in a dashboard view of charts, graphs, building floor plans and geospatial maps. Automated business rules can trigger alerts and actions, quickly providing responses to complex, interconnected events. For example, inventory control receives an automatic e-mail alert that pinpoints the location of depleted supplies. It interconnects with financial systems to analyze and choose the best vendor to reorder from. Then it feeds the data to key personnel for renegotiations and budget adjustments.
For more information on our solutions specific to the Education industry, please contact us.
