An introduction to PeopleSoft Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM): Part I
We’re asked very frequently about PeopleSoft Asset Lifecycle
Management (ALM), so perhaps it’s time to lay down a few primer posts about what ALM is and why enterprises are becoming so interested in it.
This post, the first of four parts, will discuss PeopleSoft’s ALM solution suite. As a general intro, the product was released in 2005 as part of the PeopleSoft 8.9 release. ALM is sometimes referred to as Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) (related: Wikipedia’s take on EAM). These two terms – ALM and EAM – are used interchangeably and really are reflective of the process of managing a company’s assets, defined as:
- Software and IT hardware
- Capital equipment
- Buildings/real estate
- Vehicles
- Furniture
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PeopleSoft ALM offers a significant value proposition for the PeopleSoft customer base. Primarily, from an enterprise IT/portfolio standpoint, it brings one of the final areas of an organization into the enterprise applications realm. Prior to this release, many PeopleSoft customers were forced to look to third-party applications that required interfacing (a very time consuming and expensive undertaking) with their existing PeopleSoft applications.
At the highest level, the suite of ALM products includes, as excerpted from Oracle’s website:
Maintenance Management
“Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Maintenance Management is a fully integrated solution for the maintenance of infrastructure, plant, and equipment—enabling organizations to streamline operations, facilitate compliance, and eliminate costly, inadequate custom integrations to third-party systems. Through out-of-the-box integration with other PeopleSoft Enterprise applications such as Project Costing, Asset Management, Purchasing, and Inventory, PeopleSoft Maintenance Management enables you to prioritize assets and ensure the right level of investment to meet utilization and financial goals.”
IT Asset Management
“Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise IT Asset Management manages distributed IT assets, including software, servers, laptops, desktops, and PDAs. PeopleSoft IT Asset Management integrates with Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management and Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM IT Help Desk to automatically reconcile physical and financial IT inventory, redeploy underutilized software, provide service agents with visibility into actual hardware/software configurations and help divisions meet growing compliance requirements.”
Real Estate Management
“Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Real Estate Management streamlines and automates lease administration and space management. Whether you are a corporate or a retail/franchise operation, PeopleSoft Real Estate Management offers a comprehensive solution for reducing costs and minimizing contractual and financial risk.”
(To learn more, Oracle has all the information you could ever want.)
Each of these products can provide a significant cost savings for PeopleSoft customers. Why? Well, for starters, the need for interfaces is eliminated. Also, in many cases, the cost of licensing and maintaining the applications is less than that of third-party applications providing similar functionality. Finally, information about a company’s assets is stored in a single shared set of PeopleSoft applications, providing visibility throughout the enterprise. Even though ALM requires other PeopleSoft applications to be present in a company’s applications footprint, it provides a single pane of glass when deployed correctly. And that’s something every company wants.
Another item to note about these products is that they were released with key functionality that immediately made them a viable alternative to the best-of-breed vendors. For example, Real Estate Management was highly ranked in the IREM 2006 JPM Real Estate Technology Study, going toe-to-toe with the best-of-breeds in its first year of release. This type of depth didn’t just happen overnight – it was a result of Oracle’s foresight to leverage the IP it acquired through the JD Edwards acquisition. The same type of depth has been achieved in the other ALM products as well.
We can only wonder what Oracle has in store for these upcoming stars. MiPro has been fortunate enough to have gained some in-depth knowledge and experience in implementing the ALM products (particularly Maintenance Management), and we have published a Maintenance Management whitepaper that provides a simple but solid introduction and overview of the product.
Next week I’ll jump into the Real Estate Management application, so be sure to come back (or subscribe to our RSS) if you’re interested. Alternatively, if you’re into social media, hit us up on Twitter or become our fan on Facebook.
Of course, all questions and comments welcome. Fire away.
