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About Assets

In MaintainX®, an asset is an entity that represents a piece of equipment in an organization. For example, if your company is a manufacturing plant, the conveyor belt responsible for moving products through the production line could be an asset in MaintainX.

Assets are the foundation of your maintenance program in MaintainX. They connect your work orders, parts, vendors, and teams, and give you the data you need to understand equipment health over time.

To learn what's on the asset page and what you can do there, see Viewing Assets.

Common Tasks​

Here are some common actions you can take with assets in MaintainX:

  • Create an asset: Create new assets or duplicate existing ones. For more information, see Create an Asset.
  • Edit an asset: Edit an asset, bulk edit assets, and update an asset's status. For more information, see Edit an Asset.
  • Find and filter assets: Create and use filters to customize the assets you see. For more information, see Viewing Assets.
  • Track asset health: Monitor an asset's condition over time. For more information, see About Asset Health Reports.
  • Export the asset's data: Download asset records as a file. For more information, see Export Asset Data.
  • Set up root cause analysis: Get help identifying, understanding, and solving the causes of unplanned downtime. For more information, see About Root Cause Analysis.
  • Customize asset fields: Add or edit custom asset fields to gather more details about the asset. For more information, see Asset Settings.

Important Asset Concepts​

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

Asset Attributes​

These are the core attributes you define for each asset. Attibutes such as Name, Location, Model, etc. drive filtering, reporting, and how MaintainX surfaces information to your team.

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.

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 Viewing Assets and View and Export Asset data.

Asset Structure​

These concepts describe how assets relate to one another and how they can be organized hierarchically.

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 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.

Asset Maintenance Data​

These features help you get more value from your asset data using AI, structured analysis, and cross-asset learning.

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.

MaintainX Assist-Enabled Assets​

A MaintainX Assist–enabled asset is an asset that was processed by MaintainX Assist. MaintainX Assist uses the asset's manuals and maintenance history to help you troubleshoot issues faster and build a knowledge base that supports better preventive maintenance strategies over time.

An asset is considered MaintainX Assist–enabled if it meets at least one of the following conditions:

How to identify a MaintainX Assist-enabled asset?

MaintainX Assist-enabled asset display the MaintainX Assist icon .

Screenshot showing a visual indicator for a MaintainX Assist-enabled asset.

Source Sharing for Identical Assets​

MaintainX Assist 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 and asset manuals.

When you query an asset, if MaintainX Assist identifies multiple assets with the same manufacturer and model within all your MaintainX organizations, 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 Assist response.

This feature is enabled by default. To prevent source sharing across assets, disable it in your organization settings. For details, see Allow Source Sharing for Similar Assets.

Asset Configuration​

Asset configuration are the settings that shape how assets are organized and tracked across your organization. Asset settings include asset types, custom fields, statuses, and downtime reasons.

Asset Settings​

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

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.

Asset Lifecycle​

Managing an asset's lifecycle helps you track its financial value over time and make informed decisions about repair, replacement, and retirement.

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.

Learn More​

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