Designing an asset hierarchy that survives a reorganisation

Structure your asset hierarchy by place and system, never by who currently looks after it. Departments get reorganised, contracts change hands, and a hierarchy built around either has to be rebuilt every time. Buildings and pipework stay where they are.

The five levels that work

• •Site: a location with an address
• •Building: one structure, or one clearly separate part of a campus
• •Floor or area: level 2, the roof, the yard, the basement
• •System: heating, cooling, electrical, water, fire, transport, fabric
• •Equipment: the thing itself

Five levels is enough for almost every estate. Deeper hierarchies are usually somebody encoding an organisation chart into the middle of it, and that is exactly the thing that will change.

Keep the system level

It is the level people skip and the one that pays. Without it you cannot answer "what did the heating cost across the portfolio" without tagging every job by hand. With it, that question is a click, and it is the question capital planning actually asks.

Ownership is a field, not a level

Which team, contract or cost centre looks after something changes. Put it on the asset as a property that can be updated in bulk, and leave the hierarchy alone. A contract change should be an afternoon, not a restructure.

Handle shared plant explicitly

A boiler serving three buildings has to live somewhere. Put it in the building it physically sits in, and record what it serves as a separate relationship. Trying to place it under two parents at once breaks every rollup you will ever run.

Never delete, always retire

Equipment that is removed gets marked as removed, with a date, and stays in the record. Deleting it takes its history with it, and the history is what you needed. It also means a work order from three years ago suddenly points at nothing, which is how audit trails quietly develop holes.

Test it with four questions

Before you commit to a structure, check that it answers these without anybody tagging anything: what is in this building, what does this system cost, what is on this floor, and what would we lose if we sold this site. If any of those is hard, the structure is wrong.