Asset management: what to record for each unit

The asset inventory is the piece of work that takes the longest in any rollout and shapes the result the most. It’s also where the most improvising happens: equipment gets loaded in with just its name and location, and six months in you discover you’re missing exactly the field you needed.

Here’s what to record, how to organize it, and why.

The minimum for each unit

Where it is. Location within the site, and its geographic position if the assets are spread out.

What it is. Model and manufacturer. Without this you can’t group anything.

Which one it is. Serial number. It’s what distinguishes this unit from the forty identical ones, and the key to its history.

Since when. Installation date.

How much it cost. Installation cost, which later lets you compare against what it has cost to maintain.

Covered until when. Warranty expiry. This field alone pays for the whole inventory effort: it’s very common to pay for repairs on equipment still under warranty simply because nobody had the date on hand when opening the order.

How much it matters. Priority, or criticality, which later decides the order in which it gets attended to and which maintenance strategy applies.

Custom fields

The data that describes a boiler isn’t the data that describes an elevator, a treadmill, or a van. Cramming it all into “notes” produces free text that can’t be filtered or compared.

In asset management you define custom fields with their own type and unit: power, flow rate, number of stops, payload, filter surface, speed. Each family with its own.

The test for whether a field deserves to exist: is anyone going to filter or compare by it? If not, it’s excess.

Classification, which drives everything

This is the decision that saves or costs the most over time. Assets are grouped by system, family, and model.

It’s not a decorative classification: it’s what lets almost everything else be configured once for many units.

Checklists resolve in cascade —asset, model, subfamily, family— so the checklist for a type of equipment gets defined once. With two hundred identical units, the difference between having families set up properly and not is weeks of work.

And afterward it lets you answer by system or by family when someone asks what fails most, which is how the question gets asked.

The counter

If a unit’s wear depends on usage rather than time, it needs a counter: running hours, kilometers, cycles, units produced.

Each reading is logged with who took it and when. And on top of the counter you define a limit and a warning percentage: when a reading pushes past that percentage, the system generates the preventive order automatically, with its asset and the matching checklist.

It’s what lets preventive maintenance follow actual usage instead of a calendar that treats two machines the same when they don’t work the same.

The QR code

Attached to the unit. The technician scans it and lands on the right record, with the history and documentation right there, without relying on internal numbering that everyone reads differently.

It sounds minor and solves an everyday problem: telling which of five identical AC units this one is, especially when whoever’s there isn’t who installed it.

What hangs off the asset

Once the record exists, everything else rests on it:

Its history: what’s been done to it, when, by whom, how long it took, what material was used, and what was found.

Its documentation: manuals, diagrams, certificates, in the document manager, with its visibility settings and its expiry date when it has one.

Its open anomalies, which the technician sees before starting.

Its accumulated cost, which decides whether it gets repaired again or replaced.

The replacement-cost alert

On an asset you can record its replacement cost and a warning percentage. The system compares the accumulated repair spend against that amount and notifies you when it’s exceeded.

It doesn’t generate an order — replacing a unit is a business decision, not a task — but it puts the figure in front of you exactly when it matters, instead of buried in a report nobody opened.

What you can answer afterward

The inventory, asset-movement, cost-per-asset, intervention-time, and counter reports answer what has no answer without an inventory: how much it costs to maintain each unit, which ones concentrate the failures, which model fails most across the whole installation, and which are over-maintained.

The cross-reference between anomalies and model is usually the most revealing: when a fault repeats across every unit of a model, it stops being bad luck and becomes an argument with the manufacturer, or for the next purchase.

How to build it without turning it into an endless project

The most common mistake is starting with the full inventory. Six months of loading data before seeing a single result wears any team out.

What works: critical assets first —the ones that stop production or service if they fail, and the ones with a regulatory obligation behind them— with their families properly defined. The rest gets added as it comes up: the first time someone opens a work order on a unit that isn’t registered yet, it gets registered on the spot, with its photo and its QR code.

After a few months the inventory is done, and it’s built out of what’s actually being used.

The assets that aren’t machines

An extension that often gets overlooked when designing the inventory: not everything that needs controlling is an installed piece of equipment.

Vehicles, with their plate number and mileage counter. Tools, which also get loaned out, lost, and calibrated. Personal protective equipment, with per-person assignment and expiry alerts. And components inside a machine, which is what lets you know exactly which part was replaced and when.

All of them get the same treatment: record, family, associated documentation, history, and —when relevant— a counter. Worth deciding from the start which of these are in scope, because adding them later means revisiting the entire classification.

What not to forget

Retire what no longer exists. An inventory with decommissioned equipment still on it clutters every report. The record accounts for retirement, with its date.

Keep the families up to date. If every new unit gets registered without a family, the cascade stops working and you end up configuring one by one.

If you want to see how your fleet would look, you can request a demo.