viztastic
commented
5 years ago Using your last analogy, that new gearbox may well need to be treated as a brand new asset with its own unique lifecycle.
And it may not need to be.
I think it depends on the organisation and how important that gearbox is to them. An aircraft production organisation may treat each as a unique asset in its own right, whereas a manufacturing plant may prefer to treat gearbox replacements as mere events in the one asset's lifecycle.
So how do we support the former use case and make it trivial for the user to choose either approach. My view is we should be as unopinionated as possible and leave it to the organisation to decide the granularity they need.
NRaf
An asset is a thing of value. As an example, a wind turbine is an asset because it provides value to the business - it generates electricity.
A wind turbine is comprised of a multitude of parts, such as gear boxes, rotor blades and cooling units. Each of these in turn might be made of its own parts - for example, a gearbox contains gears, shafts, a control unit and a multitude of sensors to measure things like temperature and vibration.
While the top-level asset is the wind turbine, the gearbox would also be considered an asset. If we notice the gearbox vibration exceeds a threshold, it makes sense to raise a work order for maintenance/repair against the gearbox rather than the turbine, as there might be specialist repairperson to diagnose/fix/replace the gearbox.
Somewhere in this hierarchy, parts stop being assets in their own rights but rather just parts or devices. A gear within a gearbox is probably unimportant to an asset management system, other than as part of a note in a work order to get a replacement part sent in.
Are assets seperate to actual devices? If a gearbox is replaced with another gearbox, is it a new asset entirely? I would argue yes, as it is relevant to the business to know how often gearboxes are being replaced (what's the business case for more expensive gearboxes that might have a longer service life?).