Furniture asset management best practices – Planning the lifecycle of furniture

How frequently should you update your furniture?

Let’s take hospitality as a benchmark. It’s a good example because it’s one of the core industries we specialize in, and its high furniture use means it tends to have well-structured furniture asset management processes.

In hospitality we find the average furniture asset lifecycle is seven years, which means that hotels expect to keep furniture for seven years before planning to replace it. Seven years is a generalization – we have worked with hotel chains and brands with shorter review cycles of furniture assets, and a few with longer cycles – but it’s a guide for any institution or business that is managing substantial furniture assets.

In short, furniture asset management, like any important business process, needs to be planned. We’ve previously covered elements of this, such as inventory management and talked about the ideal scenario of documenting date of acquisition, acquisition costs, composite materials, current condition and locations of existing furniture assets.

Seven years is the average lifespan we’ve seen from working with more than 22,000 customers over 37 years, but it’s not a figure set in stone (or wood). Furthermore, with wise spending and good planning the lifecycle of valuable furniture assets can be doubled.

To lengthen the lifecycle it’s important to recognize another best practice of furniture asset management, which is to invest in high-quality furniture. We sometimes see managers make furniture buying decisions based on the short-term thinking of ‘pay less now’. Poor-quality furniture has a short lifespan – it cannot be refinished or updated, and will simply end up in landfill after a few years. It’s a bad decision for the environment, and for the business. Buyers need to avoid sub-standard materials such as particleboard, chipboard or furniture which has low-quality ‘filling’ composite material.

There are a number of options when it comes to updating furniture. Furniture asset management best practices include refinishing, re-upholstery and remanufacturing. We specialize in each of these, and have updated hundreds of thousands of furniture pieces, saving our customers up to 80 percent on expenditure, preserving their environmental impact and working on-site to reduce downtime.

If you’d like to discuss the furniture asset management lifecycle in your industry, and how it can be lengthened to protect your investment in furniture assets, then please get in touch today.