What is tag allocation and why is it important?
Asset-intensive companies require thousands of asset tags to Identify and keep track of their equipment. Without these critical tags, it would be impossible to keep all assets organized. It is important that the tags are unique. They provide useful information about the equipment and therefore must correspond to the right equipment. So, what are the risks of not keeping your tags in check?
Questions about the location of their assets, who interacts with them, and more general questions like how many do they have and what maintenance needs to be done is crucial to the organization of an asset-intensive business. With no formal process, many asset-intensive businesses struggle with inconsistent tags, allocating tags, or getting personnel to comply.
Corporate Tagging Standards
Wouldn’t it be easier if you could automate the allocation of equipment and asset tags? This way you could easily conform to corporate naming conventions. For instance, say your tag needs to include the following information: area code, equipment code, equipment class code, manufacturer code, and allocated 4-degit sequential number.
It can quickly become overwhelming to manually insert this information and lead to personnel making costly mistakes.
What happens if equipment is not assigned a tag?
If equipment is not assigned a tag, then it is nearly impossible to locate it, or when located, to know valuable information about it. Tags are important for classification and to clearly label what the piece is and how to find other pertinent information about it.
What happens if a reserved number for a tag is not used?
If a reserved number is not used, the unique tag ID is never available again. When personnel are manually imputing this information, it is easy to have inconsistent, duplicate, or missing tags.
Costly to Re-tag
Error leads to costly retagging to avoid future confusion about incorrect or missing tags. Not only does this have a large price tag, but also takes more time to complete the task more than once. If an asset is marked with the wrong tag, that tag number is not unique. You must retag that equipment, along with all other equipment that may have been mistagged.
New Trends: what people are doing now
Operators rely on manual, spreadsheet-based processes. They implement a database and assign personnel to maintain it and dispense tags on request. Smart companies take advantage of using a name convention for their tags. This makes it easier to identify the type of equipment, location, year of purchase, dimensions, class, and other important information pertaining to a piece of equipment. Though these companies have an advantage, creation of the tags and keeping them unique is their major challenge.
Why this doesn’t work
This can become very complicated without an automated system. It is easy to make mistakes when someone is manually doing the work. It would be common to accidentally skip a number, or type one in wrong. Having to implement your own naming conventions and hope that they are easy to follow can also be complicated.
To automate the process of reserving and assigning the tags requires an automated workflow process for equipment tag allocation. In this system, you can have multiple levels of approval, or none. Requests can be rejected, or approvers can request additional information. This minimizes any confusion between personnel and is easy to follow.
About NRX AssetHub
NRX AssetHub provides maintenance and reliability professionals at asset-intensive businesses with world-class software solutions for analyzing, visualizing, building, editing, organizing, approving, and sustaining high-quality Asset and Maintenance Data for the Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Computerized Maintenance Management (CMMS) systems. We help our customers get their CMMS data right.
Stay tuned to discover more use cases that Greg Dee, President of HubHead, described in his February 3rd blog post, “Necessity is the mother of invention”.
To learn more about how NRX AssetHub helps:
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