Asset management

Asset management, broadly defined, refers to any system that monitors and maintains things of value to an entity or group. It may apply to both tangible assets such as buildings and to intangible assets such as human capital, intellectual property, and goodwill and financial assets. Asset management is a systematic process of deploying, operating, maintaining, upgrading, and disposing of assets cost-effectively.

The term is most commonly used in the financial world to describe people and companies that manage investments on behalf of others. These include, for example, investment managers that manage the assets of a pension fund.

Alternative views of asset management in the engineering environment are: the practice of managing assets to achieve the greatest return (particularly useful for productive assets such as plant and equipment), and the process of monitoring and maintaining facilities systems, with the objective of providing the best possible service to users (appropriate for public infrastructure assets).

The most common usage of the term "asset manager" refers to investment management, the sector of the financial services industry that manages investment funds and segregated client accounts. An asset management is a part of a financial company which comprises experts who manage money and handle the investments of clients. From studying the client's assets to planning and looking after the investments, all things are looked after by the asset managers and recommendations are provided based on the financial health of each client.

Infrastructure asset management is the combination of management, financial, economic, engineering, and other practices applied to physical assets with the objective of providing the required level of service in the most cost-effective manner. It includes the management of the entire lifecycle—including design, construction, commissioning, operating, maintaining, repairing, modifying, replacing and decommissioning/disposal—of physical and infrastructure assets. Operating and sustainment of assets in a constrained budget environment require a prioritization scheme. As a way of illustration, the recent development of renewable energy has seen the rise of effective asset managers involved in the management of solar systems (solar park, rooftops and windmills). These teams are actually more and more teaming-up with financial asset managers in order to offer turn key solutions to investors. Infrastructure asset management became very important in most of the developed countries in the 21st century, since their infrastructure network became almost complete in the 20th century and they have to manage to operate and maintain them cost effectively.Software asset management is one kind of infrastructure asset management.

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Wikipedia