Duration 5 Days – 35 hrs.

 

Overview

This course provides automation professionals with a practical, end-to-end understanding of business-to-business asset management processes. It examines the complete asset lifecycle—from planning, sourcing, acquisition, receipt, deployment, operation, maintenance, movement, and inventory control through retirement and disposal.

 

Participants will learn how business teams, suppliers, customers, service providers, finance, procurement, operations, and technology functions interact throughout the asset lifecycle. The course also identifies repetitive, rules-based activities suitable for workflow automation, robotic process automation (RPA), intelligent document processing, system integration, analytics, and AI-assisted decision support.

 

The course is technology-neutral and applicable to physical, IT, operational, leased, and customer-deployed assets.

 

Objectives

• Explain the complete B2B asset management lifecycle.
• Identify the stakeholders, systems, documents, controls, and data involved in each lifecycle stage.
• Differentiate physical, IT, operational, leased, customer-deployed, and intangible assets.
• Map current-state and future-state asset management processes.
• Understand the relationship between asset management, procurement, finance, inventory, contracts, maintenance, and service management.
• Identify manual tasks, bottlenecks, control gaps, and automation opportunities.
• Define business rules, exceptions, approvals, and audit requirements for automated workflows.
• Evaluate the suitability of RPA, workflow automation, APIs, AI, analytics, RFID, barcode, and IoT technologies.
• Define appropriate KPIs and control measures for automated asset processes.
• Develop a high-level automation roadmap and business case.

 

Target Audience 

• RPA developers and automation engineers
• Business process analysts
• Business analysts and systems analysts
• Process improvement and transformation professionals
• Asset management and facilities personnel
• IT asset management professionals
• Procurement and supply chain professionals
• Finance and fixed-asset accounting personnel
• Maintenance and operations teams
• Enterprise application and ERP professionals
• Internal control, audit, risk, and compliance personnel
• Project managers and product owners involved in automation initiatives

 

Prerequisites 

• Basic knowledge of business processes and workflow concepts
• Familiarity with process mapping or business analysis
• General understanding of procurement, finance, inventory, or operations
• Basic awareness of automation technologies such as RPA, workflow tools, APIs, or ERP systems
• Programming experience is not required. Participants may bring sample processes, forms, reports, or automation use cases for workshop activities.

 

Course Outline

 

Day 1 – B2B Asset Management Foundations and Lifecycle Planning

Module 1: Introduction to B2B Asset Management 

• Definition and purpose of asset management
• Asset management versus inventory management
• Physical, IT, operational, leased, intangible, and customer-deployed assets
• Capital assets versus operating assets
• Asset owners, custodians, users, suppliers, customers, and service providers
• Overview of relevant asset management principles and standards
• Asset policies, governance, accountability, and segregation of duties

 

Module 2: End-to-End Asset Lifecycle 

• Demand and investment planning
• Budgeting and business-case approval
• Sourcing and acquisition
• Receipt, inspection, registration, and capitalization
• Deployment, assignment, and operational use
• Maintenance, movement, and inventory control
• Return, retirement, disposal, and replacement
• Lifecycle records and audit trail requirements

 

Module 3: Asset Planning and Demand Management 

• Business requirements and demand forecasting
• Asset standardization and approved catalogs
• Capital expenditure and operating expenditure planning
• Repair-versus-replace decisions
• Asset availability and utilization analysis
• Approval thresholds and authorization matrices
• Automation opportunities in planning and approval workflows

Workshop

• Map a high-level asset lifecycle.
• Identify stakeholders, systems, documents, and control points.

 

Day 2 – Acquisition, Receiving and Asset Registration

Module 4: Sourcing and Procurement Integration 

• Purchase requisitions and approval workflows
• Supplier sourcing, quotations, and evaluation
• Purchase orders and contract creation
• Framework agreements and service contracts
• Supplier-provided, leased, rented, and managed assets
• Purchase order amendments and cancellations
• Procurement and asset master-data integration

 

Module 5: Receiving and Acceptance 

• Delivery scheduling and receiving
• Verification against purchase orders and delivery documents
• Inspection, testing, and acceptance
• Recording serial numbers, models, quantities, and specifications
• Handling discrepancies, damaged items, and rejected deliveries
• Goods receipt and acceptance documentation
• Three-way matching among purchase order, receipt, and invoice

 

Module 6: Asset Registration and Capitalization 

• Asset identification and classification
• Asset master-record creation
• Barcode, QR code, RFID, and IoT tagging
• Ownership, location, custodian, and cost-center assignment
• Capitalization rules and placed-in-service dates
• Useful life, residual value, and depreciation methods
• Integration between procurement, asset registers, ERP, and finance

Workshop

• Design an automated acquisition-to-registration workflow.
• Define business rules and exception paths.

 

Day 3 – Deployment, Tracking and Operational Management

Module 7: Asset Deployment and Assignment 

• Asset preparation and configuration
• Assignment to employees, departments, customers, or locations
• Custody acknowledgement and proof of delivery
• Customer-site deployment and installation
• Asset transfer, reassignment, and relocation
• Temporary issuance and loaned assets
• Return and recovery processes

 

Module 8: Asset Tracking and Inventory Control 

• Centralized asset-register management
• Real-time location and status tracking
• Physical asset counts and cycle counts
• Asset reconciliation and discrepancy handling
• Lost, stolen, damaged, and unaccounted-for assets
• Ownership and custody verification
• Data quality, duplication, and incomplete records
• Mobile scanning, RFID, and IoT-enabled monitoring

 

Module 9: Software, License and IT Asset Considerations 

• Hardware and software asset relationships
• License entitlement and usage monitoring
• Warranty, subscription, and renewal tracking
• Configuration and asset management data
• Integration with service desks and configuration management databases
• Security, access, and data privacy considerations

Workshop

• Analyze an asset deployment and tracking process.
• Identify control gaps and automation opportunities.

 

Day 4 – Maintenance, Financial Control and Compliance

Module 10: Maintenance and Service Management 

• Preventive, predictive, corrective, and condition-based maintenance
• Maintenance requests and work orders
• Scheduling technicians, vendors, tools, and spare parts
• Service-level agreements and escalation rules
• Warranty claims and vendor service coordination
• Maintenance history and equipment downtime
• IoT alerts and predictive maintenance applications
• Maintenance cost and performance analysis

 

Module 11: Asset Financial Management 

• Acquisition and total lifecycle cost
• Depreciation and accumulated depreciation
• Asset impairment and revaluation
• Transfers between cost centers or legal entities
• Lease and rental cost considerations
• Maintenance, insurance, and operating costs
• Asset reconciliation with the general ledger
• Chargeback and customer billing for managed assets

 

Module 12: Risk, Compliance and Audit Controls 

• Asset policies and control frameworks
• Approval limits and segregation of duties
• Record retention and supporting documentation
• Audit trails and evidence management
• Physical security and cybersecurity considerations
• Regulatory, environmental, and contractual obligations
• Fraud risks and ghost assets
• Control monitoring and exception reporting

Workshop

• Create a control matrix for an automated asset management process.

  

Day 5 – Retirement, Automation Design and Roadmap Development

Module 13: Asset Retirement and Disposal 

• End-of-life assessment
• Retirement and disposal approvals
• Asset return, recovery, and decommissioning
• Data backup, sanitization, and destruction
• Sale, donation, recycling, trade-in, and scrapping
• Disposal vendor management
• Gain or loss on disposal
• Removal from the asset register and financial records
• Certificates of destruction and environmental compliance

 

Module 14: Automation Technologies and Use Cases 

• Workflow and business process automation
• Robotic process automation
• Intelligent document processing and OCR
• System integration through APIs
• AI-assisted classification, anomaly detection, and forecasting
• Barcode, RFID, mobile, and IoT integration
• Process mining and task mining
• Human-in-the-loop controls
• Attended versus unattended automation
• Examples of automation across the asset lifecycle

 

Module 15: Automation Opportunity Assessment 

• Identifying repetitive, rules-based, high-volume activities
• Evaluating process stability and data readiness
• Assessing automation complexity, value, risk, and feasibility
• Capturing business rules and exceptions
• Prioritizing use cases
• Build, buy, integrate, or configure decisions
• Defining functional and non-functional requirements
• Designing future-state processes

 

Module 16: Performance Measurement and Continuous Improvement 

• Asset availability and utilization
• Asset accuracy and reconciliation rate
• Maintenance cost and downtime
• Mean time between failures and mean time to repair
• Asset loss and recovery rate
• Procurement-to-deployment cycle time
• Automation success, exception, and rework rates
• Dashboard and management-reporting requirements
• Continuous monitoring and process improvement

 

Capstone Workshop 

Participants will develop and present a high-level automation proposal for a selected asset management process, including:

• Current-state process
• Identified problems and control gaps
• Proposed future-state workflow
• Automation technologies
• Business rules and exception handling
• Required data and system integrations
• Risks and controls
• Expected benefits and KPIs
• Phased implementation roadmap