How to – Creating an Effective Hierarchy

The equipment Hierarchy is the family tree of your equipment.  Its how you keep your equipment organized. 

There is no set way you HAVE to setup your hierarchy, what this article will talk about are some recommendations or best practices to keep in mind when creating a Hierarchy.

These are some benefits to setting up a clean equipment Hierarchy:

Searching –  You can use the Hierarchical view of the equipment search from Work order screens, PM screens and the equipment entry screen.  With a cleanly set up Equipment Hierarchy this search is easy to use by drilling down through levels such as buildings, Rooms, production lines and so on. Using this method users can accurately find and associate the correct asset to their work requests.

Maintenance Planning – Assets sharing the same location, Power source or other utility can be identified and service planned in tandem.

Analysis – The real value of a well laid out is the data analytics it affords. Providing the ability to use reports such as the Equipment Hierarchical structure report to track repairs and repair costs

Types of Hierarchy Setup

By Asset Location – Buildings and Rooms

In this type of Hierarchy assets are organized by their physical location.

This Hierarchy would be built by creating a Building in the Building Entry Screen that represents a physical building. The next level of the Hierarchy would be made up by creating a Room Entry for each physical room within the building. From there, use Equipment Entry to create an entry for each asset in the room that may have WO or PM created for it.

It will look like this:

By Asset Location – Production Lines

In this type of Hierarchy assets are organized by their physical location.

This Hierarchy would be built by creating a Building in the Building Entry Screen that represents a physical building. From there, use Equipment Entry to create an entry for the production line as a whole with the Building entered in the Parent field. Next, create an Equipment Entry each asset on the production line that may have WO or PM created for it.

It will look like this:

By System

In this type of Hierarchy assets are organized by the system they are part of.

This Hierarchy would be built by Creating building in the Building Entry screen that represents a physical building. From there, use the Equipment Entry to create an entry to represent the system with the building as the parent of the equipment. Next create Equipment Entries for each of the physical assets within the system.

It will look like this: