Struggling with your Asset Hierarchy? Here’s Why

An asset hierarchy is a way to organize equipment located at different locations. Last year, we noticed many of our clients needed help building or restructuring asset hierarchies. You may already have your hierarchy structure in place, but struggling to improve and optimize its quality. Reorganizing your asset hierarchy can be an uphill battle because it requires much labour.

If your asset hierarchy is not structured properly, it can complicate your entire maintenance process. It becomes harder to monitor assets and manage operations across facilities, which leads to inconsistencies across multiple sites. When used correctly, asset hierarchies become a solid foundation for asset management and helps streamline maintenance and reliability activities.

Many companies struggle with building or reorganizing their hierarchies, so you are not alone if you have this problem. There are a couple reasons why you may be finding it difficult to extract value from your asset hierarchy. Here are three of the most common reasons:

1) In some cases, each facility at an asset-intensive organization builds their own unique hierarchy. Meaning, there is no uniformity between any of the sites. While each facility may have unique needs and objectives, the importance of standardizing asset management across all sites remains the same.

2) Some asset-intensive companies struggle with their asset hierarchy due to a lack of corporate standards. In this case, guidelines are not clearly specified and there is no official method for ensuring the standard is being followed. This creates confusion about what data needs to be collected for each equipment, as well as inconsistencies between facilities.

3) Similar to building a bill of materials, some companies choose to hire a third-party contractor to build out an asset hierarchy for them. Third-parties often charge by the hour and do not use productivity tools, which makes it challenging to supervise the progress of building the hierarchy, visualize the work in progress, and review and edit along the way.

Align your asset hierarchy with an international standard

Using the NRX AssetHub solution, HubHead has helped many asset-intensive organizations align their asset hierarchy with international standards including ISO 14224, RDS-PP, and KKS. This has helped our customers efficiently collect maintenance data for equipment while saving time and cost. If you are curious about our solution and would like to learn more, feel free to book a demo and our team would be happy to assist you!