Introducing The Purchases Module: The Newest Member Of The Beam Asset Management Family

Our mission at Beam, is to help organizations increase the ROI on their fixed assets. We believe that key to achieving this outcome is consolidating your financial, maintenance, and operational workflows under one roof. In doing so, you are un-siloing your teams, making communication easier, and, most importantly, you are turning your once scattered asset data into a structured, analyzable dataset that can be mined for actionable intelligence. Today, we are bringing another workflow (and its associated data) under the Beam roof: Purchases. The Beam Purchases module gives you the ability to create, track, and organize purchases for new assets right from your Beam workspace. We believe that this addition to Beam will not only make your job easier, but it will give you greater visibility into where money is leaking from your organization and how it can be stopped.

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What is the Purchases Module

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On the surface, the Beam Purchases module is like any other Purchase Tracking solution on the market. You can use it to create new purchase requests, organize your requests by category & priority, and assign them to the relevant stakeholder for further action.

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What makes Beam’s Purchasing module special, however, is its deep integration with the rest of Beam’s suite of asset management tools. Beam purchases can also be linked to related service tickets and assets.

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Having your service, inventory management, and purchase management workflows co-located, gives you two benefits:

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1. On an operational level, your team’s day-to-day workflow is streamlined as they have to switch between one less app to do their job.
2. Organizing your purchasing data and linking it with relevant usage and maintenance data, unlocks business intelligence that was previously unavailable to you.

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What Sort Of Business Intelligence Does Purchase Data Unlock

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Picture this. At the end of the quarter you’re digging into your purchase data and you find that emergency purchase volume has seen an uptick this quarter. You break that category out and dig into what the drivers of that uptick were. It turns out that a particular camera chain had been particularly faulty this quarter (high ticket volume). 

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First, this insight gives you the data you need to justify the uptick to your own organization. Second, and perhaps most importantly, now that you know where the leak is, you can devise a strategy to plug it and prevent it from happening again. Perhaps you preemptively run preventative maintenance on similar camera chains in your inventory that haven’t gone down yet; Maybe, you supplement that by re-negotiating the terms of your SLA with the OEM leveraging your data as supporting evidence. If the situation is dire, you could even decide to switch the camera from that particular  chain, and your Beam data is there to back up that decision.

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The bottom line: Beam’s Purchasing module unlocks the hidden potential of your purchasing data to yield cost-savings to your organization.

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Getting Started With Purchases In Beam

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The Purchases module is currently live for all Beam users. Access it by clicking on Purchases in the navbar on the left side of your Beam workspace.

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If you need help figuring out how to use the Purchases module, contact your Beam specialist or check out our documentation on the topic, today.

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