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About Assets

In MaintainX®, an asset is an entity that represents a piece of equipment in an organization. For instance, if your company is a car wash, the shower head responsible for spraying foam onto cars could be an asset in MaintainX.

Important Asset Concepts​

Here are some important concepts and properties of assets. For details about those different properties, see Asset Form Fields.

Asset Types​

Assets can have types. A type acts as a label for an asset. An asset can have more than one type. Types can help you organize assets in your organization. You can create and customize them. You can use asset types to filter and report on assets.

Global Asset Types​

If your MaintainX account includes a Global Organization, global asset types help you standardize and efficiently manage assets across all your sub-organizations. You can create asset types in your Global Organization and roll them out to sub-organizations, or merge duplicate or redundant asset types from sub-organizations into new global asset types. For more details, see Global Asset Types.

Criticality​

Criticality is a measure of how important an asset is to your company. It's a field in the asset form that specifies whether the asset is Critical, Important or Normal for your organization. Criticality can be used for filtering and reporting.

For more information, see View and Filter Assets and View and Export Asset data.

Asset Status​

An asset's status represents the state of the asset. An asset in MaintainX can have the following statuses:

  • Online: the asset is working as expected.
  • Offline: the asset is not operational, usually for planned or unplanned maintenance.
  • Do Not Track: do not track the asset's uptime/downtime.

Offline assets can have downtime types. An offline status for an asset is either planned or unplanned. For example, planned downtime might be for a planned safety check that's part of your preventive maintenance program. Unplanned downtime might be related to a power outage that requires reactive maintenance to fix.

You can add custom downtime reasons to provide better visibility and reporting on the state of your assets. For more information, see Asset Settings.

Downtime types are essential for overall equipment effectiveness and for Asset Health reporting (see About Asset Health Reports).

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For more context about preventive maintenance, see What Is Preventive Maintenance? The Beginner's Guide to Running PMs on the MaintainX blog.

Asset Hierarchies​

An asset hierarchy is a way of representing a piece of equipment (that you typically fix) and its components in MaintainX. It's a logical structural arrangement that shows how the components are related to each other.

In an asset hierarchy, there is a high-level asset (root node) that represents broader categories, while lower-level assets (child nodes) show individual components within them. Asset hierarchies are structured in a top-down manner using parent-child relationships. You can create as many asset hierarchies as you want to represent each piece of equipment that you want to track and manage.

To learn more about the relationship between assets and sub-assets, see About Asset Hierarchies.

Asset Depreciation​

Depreciation is a way of allocating the cost of an asset over its useful life. Calculating depreciation helps you track the gradual decline in an asset's value over time and manage your assets' financial lifecycle more effectively. You can:

  • Evaluate the financial health of your assets.
  • Make informed decisions about asset replacement and repair.
  • Comply with accounting and tax reporting requirements.

In MaintainX you can track straight-line depreciation, which allocates the cost of an asset evenly over its useful life. Straight-line depreciation assumes the asset loses value at a consistent rate each year.

To learn how to set up and track depreciation for assets, see Asset Depreciation.

Asset Audit Log​

The asset audit log allows you to see the history of portable assets as you move them to other parent assets or locations. Portable assets are assets that can be moved around from one location or parent to another as needed. You can download an asset's audit log to use for reporting or auditing. For more information, see Create an Asset Audit Log.

MaintainX CoPilot® AI Assistant​

MaintainX CoPilot is an AI-powered assistant trained on documents attached to your assets like manuals, SOPs, or notes you upload to MaintainX. It can answer questions about your assets to help with your maintenance tasks. MaintainX CoPilot also leverages knowledge extracted from your work order summaries to answer your questions. For details, see Work Order Summary.

To help MaintainX CoPilot extract information from your documents and work order summaries, you ask questions the same way you would ask a coworker.

MaintainX CoPilot returns an answer that you can use to do any of the following:

  • Generate a procedure.
  • Create a work order.
  • Copy to the clipboard. For example, to paste it into your work order's Description field.

For details, see MaintainX CoPilot.

After getting an answer from MaintainX CoPilot, you can view the list of resources it used to generate the response by navigating to the MaintainX CoPilot tab.

MaintainX CoPilot also helps you execute your work faster by:

Root Cause Analysis Reporting​

Root cause analysis is a problem-solving method that helps you identify, understand, and solve the causes of unplanned downtime for critical assets. The root cause analysis tools in MaintainX help you perform structured root cause logging for asset failures.

To set up root cause analysis for your organization, you create categories and options that describe different types of asset failure. Your maintenance team creates root cause analysis reports by selecting the right categories and options, so you can document and analyze asset failures consistently. You can create a root cause analysis report whenever an asset's status changes, or create an ad-hoc report for any asset.

For details, see About Root Cause Analysis.

Assets Shared Sources​

Identical assets within your organization can share memory. MaintainX CoPilot identifies assets with the same manufacturer and model and shares relevant sources across them to better understand asset context, suggest more tailored work tasks, and continuously improve workflow consistency. Shared sources include historical work order summaries.

When you query an asset, if MaintainX CoPilot identifies multiple assets with the same manufacturer and model, it searches across those assets and their related data to generate a response. You can view the sources used to answer your question by selecting Sources next to the MaintainX CoPilot response.

This feature is enabled by default. If you don't want to share memory across assets, you can disable it in your organization settings. For details, see Allow Source Sharing for Similar Assets.

Assets and Other MaintainX Entities​

This section explains how assets are connected to other MaintainX entities.

Work Orders​

A work order is a document that details and records progress on a maintenance task for an asset. For more information on the relationship between an asset and a work order, see Create a Work Order.

An asset's work order history is a good way to see the work that's planned for your assets by your team. For more information, see View and Export Asset Data.

If your asset is part of an asset hierarchy, you can choose what happens to its work order history when you change its parent asset. For more information see, Manage Work Order History for an Asset.

Parts​

An asset can be linked to multiple parts. Parts are consumable pieces used by assets, or items used for maintenance on an asset. For example, in a car wash, an industrial light can be an asset. A part linked to this asset is a fluorescent bulb.

Work Requests​

A work request is a request to create a work order for maintenance or other work. A work request can specify work for a specific asset. For more information, see About Requests.

Locations​

An asset can be associated with a location. In MaintainX, a location represents a physical place where your company operates. For example, a location could be a site, or one building in a compound.

Teams​

An asset can be assigned to multiple teams. These teams are responsible for the maintenance work for that asset.

Vendors​

A vendor represents a company or person that provides assets, parts, or services to your organization. An asset can be associated with multiple vendors.

Asset Settings​

You can create asset types or have customized fields for your assets. For more information, see Asset Settings.

Learn More​

To learn more about assets in MaintainX, visit our video library.