For someone looking to find out more about asset tracking and inventory management, he or she might best be served by becoming a member of the NPMA. An acronym standing for National Property Management Association, the NMPA has the stated goal of being “the world leader and the preferred source of knowledge, education, advice and guidance in the profession of personal property and fixed-asset management,” and it strives continuously to make good on this mission. Offering everything from property management manuals, to an extensive archive of training literature, to webinars for those who wish to enhance their skill-set at overseeing their companies’ assets, the NPMA has been a leading institution for over 30 years, and continues to expand its “thought leadership” role in terms of property management.
As a member of NPMA and a recent sponsor of their annual National Education Seminar (NES), we at Metalcraft quite obviously seek to be a “thought leader” ourselves. We view the organization as an interactive, colloquial forum for us to teach – and to learn from – other companies as far as effective strategies of managing assets. Our main point of interest is learning the best way to serve the individual business client of ours. Over the past decade, for instance, not only have we gained powerful insight into the increasing role played by RFID asset tracking technology in today’s companies, but we have also learned that sometimes a company doesn’t need to spend large sums of money on cutting-edge technology to maintain effectively its assets. While RFID technology is indeed a powerful management tool, it need not be applied on a case-by-case basis.
In the business culture of America today, business owners and managers have a tendency to “throw technology at the problem,” by using the “latest and greatest” means of solving an issue by sheer force of novelty. We don’t necessarily subscribe to that view ourselves. Sometimes a less novel approach (like traditional asset IDs) is actually a better approach. The solution fits the customer, never the other way around. It’s one of the core values of NMPA, and one that makes them a near and dear colleague of ours.