What Makes a Good Asset Hierarchy?

An asset hierarchy allows companies to organize their equipment and machines stationed across various locations. It is critical for understanding how action on one machine affects other machines and establishing the parent-child relationship amongst multiple assets. An accurate asset hierarchy structured correctly is extremely valuable to asset-intensive companies and supports efficient maintenance practices.

What Happens if Your Asset Hierarchy is Not Structured Correctly?

If your asset hierarchy is not structured correctly, it can be challenging to monitor your assets. You may not be able to identify common equipment failures to determine where improvements to your maintenance processes are required. When structured correctly, hierarchies become a solid foundation for asset management and help streamline maintenance and reliability practices.

All Your Assets Are There

Similar objects may be found in different places and parts of your asset hierarchy with no set structure for your hierarchy. Some of your assets may not be listed in your hierarchy at all. Suppose maintenance and reliability professionals cannot visualize the asset hierarchy. In that case, they may have to spend extensive time locating assets or creating work orders because they cannot find assets in the hierarchy.

There is a Clear Corporate Standard

Aligning your asset hierarchy with a straightforward corporate standard such as ISO 14224, RDS-PP, or KKS can help you quickly identify any equipment that does not comply with guidelines set out by the standard and efficiently track the progress of your projects. Without corporate standards or specific guidelines about what data needs to be collected, there may be confusion amongst maintenance technicians and inconsistencies between your facilities.

Naming Conventions Make Sense

Using unique and logical naming conventions improves the functionality of your asset hierarchy. This allows maintenance technicians to quickly determine what an asset listed in the hierarchy is based on its name.

Your Asset Hierarchy Should Be Functional or Process-Oriented 

The key determiner of whether your asset hierarchy is structured correctly is whether it is functional or process-oriented. It is important to ensure your asset hierarchy is structured in a way that best supports efficient maintenance practices within your company. It must also help you collect reliability and maintenance data for equipment in all your facilities during the equipment’s operational lifecycle.

How Can NRX Help?

An EAM migration is ideal for reviewing your asset hierarchy and seeing if the structure can be modified to improve performance. This is because it is challenging to fix your hierarchy in a live system with lots of transactional data. A migration provides an opportunity when you already need to bring your data out of your current EAM or CMMS system.

HubHead Corp., powered by NRX AssetHub, can help your company to build out your asset hierarchy to ensure your data makes sense or to align your data with standards such as ISO 14224, RDS-PP, or KKS. NRX AssetHub provides asset-intensive businesses with world-class software for visualizing, building, editing, organizing, governing, and sustaining high-quality asset data for their EAM and CMMS systems. If you would like to learn more about how we can help you restructure your asset hierarchy, feel free to book a demo, and our team would be happy to help!