HARDCAT Asset Management Worldwide

According to Mr Sam Caruso, Project Leader For Shell Commercial, Shell acquired many businesses and took on all of their assets as part of the consolidation process. This included thousands and thousands of individual items from office equipment, storage tanks, bowsers and vehicles in a vast array of locations. It also needed to bring fixed assets that had previously being administered independently albeit as part of Shell’s vast array of operations under centralised control.

"We recognised the need to do something about how we were going to manage all the different assets that the various businesses had accumulated," Mr Caruso said. "Not only did each business have it’s own methods for accounting for assets but there was also confusion as to who owned what.

"Some of the assets were owned by various distributor business, others were owned by the customers and the remainder owned by Shell. There were also owned assets that had been ‘loaned’ to customers.

To comply with strict corporate governance requirements, Shell also needed to be able to have a real-time view into what assets it owned, where they were at any given time and what they were worth or what they were costing. It needed to be able to account for the full life cycle of its assets at a glance including their origins, depreciation, usage, maintenance and redundancy.

"The full inventory of assets from the consolidated businesses needed to be verified and reconciled back to our financials," Mr Caruso said. "It was a mammoth task."

Shell assessed about 50 different asset management software options before singling out their preferred supplier.

"Hardcat's solution was the only one we saw that used bar-coding and scanner technology which meant that once the system was implemented, verifying, updating and tracking of the assets was very easy," he said. "Bar-coding and scanning takes away a lot of the labour involved. The alternatives required far more manual input to update data within the asset database."

Shell has run its Hardcat solution on a Citrix server with thin client terminals based in each of its regional focal points in NSW, Queensland and Victoria as well as the national asset administration centre which is based in South Australia.

Mr Caruso said that there has been numerous benefits from using the Hardcat fixed asset management software and they are continually finding additional ways to expand its functionality within the organisation.

"Hardcat can manage any sort of file type that we care to put in there," Mr Caruso said. "There is an existing occupational health, safety, and environmental (HSE) project happening at the moment across the organisation.

"To ensure that our self-imposed HSE standards are being fulfilled in the delivery of product, we are taking photos of aboveground tanks and bowsers etc. at customer sites and storing them all in a Hardcat database for further reference."

In its consolidation process, Shell has found that barcoding all of its assets has been hugely beneficial in accounting "This entire exercise allowed us to cleanse our assets which has been crucial to good management of the consolidation," Mr Caruso said. "Once the assets were bar-coded, you were physically identifying and asset whereas in the other packages, you were just saying that it existed and manually entering the information into a database.

Hardcat has delivered a good return on investment for Shell. Not only has the company managed to save money in the managing its assets but because it now has a real time view of its entire inventory, there is far less loss through asset write-offs.

"Without a doubt, Hardcat has been a tool that we have been able to use to drive down costs in numerous ways," Mr Caruso said. "I would say that costs alone have been reduced by 25-30 per cent. We have saved time and money in staff and operations. There is now just two and half people running the assets where previously we would have had six."

Another cost benefit Shell has achieved, through the use of Hardcat, has been through the maintenance module – employed to distributed bowsers and tanks.

"In the past when we had repair or maintenance needs with new bowsers or tanks, we would just pay repairers because we were too busy to check out whether it was under warranty or not," Mr Caruso. "There were often incidents where we just paid repairers when we had warranty cover or we would get them to fix the same problem four times over because we were unable to easily monitor such assets. Now we have a team in Queensland that uses a Hardcat database to monitor all these repairs and maintenance. This has noticeably driven costs down in that area."

Mr Caruso said that one attractive aspect about Hardcat is that the classification of that barcoded asset can vary. Shell has been able to specify whether an asset is an owned, leased, rented or borrowed.

According to Mr Caruso, Shell's asset management consolidation project has been a big one but it is very comfortable with the decision it made to go with Hardcat.

"The end result will far outweigh what we have invested," he said. "Sometimes when you see a product, you just know that it is going to be good for your business. We had a feeling right from the start that this product was going to be successful and that Hardcat was the right software for the job."