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Asset hierarchy

A parent-child structure that organizes assets by location, system, or function, from site down to component.

How it works

An asset hierarchy is a tree. A typical one for a plant goes site, building or area, production line, machine, and component. A pump station might go site, station, pump set, pump, motor. Each level is the parent of the levels below it.

Hierarchies are usually built around one of three ideas:

  • Location: where things are. Easy for technicians to navigate.
  • System: what works together, such as a cooling circuit or a conveyor line.
  • Function: what job a position does, independent of which physical unit fills it. SAP calls these functional locations; the equipment installed there can be swapped.

Why it matters

The hierarchy decides how people find things and how costs and failures roll up. If downtime on a gearbox is recorded against the gearbox, you can still see it at line level and at site level. Without a hierarchy, every report is a flat list that someone has to sort by hand.

In practice

Keep it shallow enough to navigate on a phone, usually four to six levels. Use the same pattern across sites so that "Line 2" means the same kind of thing everywhere. Stop at the level where you actually record work; going down to every bearing adds records nobody maintains.

Field service teams often use customer, site, and installed machine as the top levels.

For a step-by-step approach, see Build an asset hierarchy.