Catalog Your Assets

By Rick Wheeler,  Life Cycle Engineering

When companies want to develop or improve their asset-management program, it’s quite common for them to discover they don’t have an accurate list of the assets. The catalyst for some organizations is compliance with the ISO 55000 series of standards. This requires understanding how goals and objectives relate to the physical assets, followed by identifying the current asset condition and the likelihood of them meeting those requirements.    

Other organizations are prompted to seek help when they look to replace aging infrastructure. In this situation, they are usually asking for help to create an asset health index or asset register. Developing either isn’t feasible without a comprehensive list of the assets.

To develop a holistic asset-management system, first gather asset master data. Organizations usually begin with these two business processes: Asset Data Collection and Asset Hierarchy Development.   

Asset Data Collection (ADC)

is the process used to identify and collect asset data and asset-type characteristics so they can be entered into a computer maintenance management system (CMMS/EAM) to a master record of asset data. Complete and accurate asset data makes possible informed and appropriate decisions across the asset-management spectrum. Accurate data is necessary to build an asset hierarchy, perform asset-criticality analysis, manage spare parts, establish a bill of materials (BOM), and develop a maintenance strategy.

Asset Hierarchy Development (AHD)

is the process used to create the hierarchical relationships between company, sites, systems, and assets as a way of showing the grandparent-parent-child relationship for the purpose of effective asset management. As a fundamental component of your CMMS/EAM system, asset hierarchy plays an integral role in work management, failure tracking, maintenance cost accounting, and asset downtime tracking. A well-defined asset hierarchy will allow more accurate planning and assignment of work, better control of parts/components, and allocation of maintenance costs to the right equipment at the correct level of detail. It allows the condition and performance of equipment to be tracked and managed and feeds critical information into the asset-health register which, in turn, informs the strategic capital plan.

While it’s certainly not as glamorous as Industry 4.0, establishing accurate, comprehensive data is foundational to your asset-management system and your asset-health register. EP

Rick Wheeler is the Executive Director of Asset Management Services at Life Cycle Engineering, Charleston, SC (LCE.com).
He is responsible for deploying new products and services to support asset-management systems based on the ISO 55000 body of knowledge. Rick is a member of USTAG 251, which updates and improves ISO 55000 standards and of the GFMAM P-20 work team, charged with updating the Maintenance Framework document. Reach Wheeler at rwheeler@LCE.com.