Well, we started this series of posts on Equipment Inventory & Tagging way back in 2024 and here we are at the end.  We have covered a lot of ground on this topic and I hope that it’s helped you and your team advance your thinking on asset management.

I wanted to wrap up the series by looking at approaches to answering one of the most important questions that you should ask as part of your entire program, “What are we going to tag?”.

Having collaborated with many clients on tagging projects, I have seen some clients tag a fairly small number of pieces of equipment, while others have tagged almost everything within a building (including individual tags on each piece of door hardware).  There truly is no right answer to the question.  

Ultimately, you should tag each piece of equipment that you want to conduct preventative maintenance tasks on, allowing you to track activities back to an individual piece of equipment (as discussed in a previous post in this series).  However, we recommend an evolutionary approach to implementing a Preventative Maintenance program.  If you are doing very little right now, trying to start out and do everything all at once is probably going to overload your capacity and maybe even your capabilities.  

To me, the best answer is to only tag the equipment for which you have the staff to manage the dataset going forward.  Even more than FCA/Capital Planning data, Equipment Inventory data is incredibly robust and granular.  The resources required to maintain it as you change out pieces of equipment can be daunting, especially if you don’t have a plan to stay on top of it.  

As a result, we recommend that you tend to start with a smaller dataset and work up to a more complete dataset over time, once you are sure that you can handle the data management.  

The challenge is that it is difficult to know if you can manage the dataset for specific equipment without getting a sample of the dataset first.  This is where the pilot comes in.  The best way to understand how many data points to expect based on a certain list of equipment being tagged is to run a small-scale pilot on a representative sample of buildings so you can get a real world sense of what it will look like.

If the pilot gives you a dataset that is too big for you to handle, dial back the types of equipment you tag on the first go-round.  If it looks manageable, stick with it.  If you feel that you can do more, add a few more types of equipment to the pilot and confirm if you were right.

Doing an Equipment Inventory project is a significant undertaking.  Finding your goldilocks position (Not Too Much Data, Not Too Little Data, Just the Right Amount of Data) is key, especially when you are just getting started on your program.  Experiment, do a pilot and make sure you find it, then go out and do it across your entire portfolio.  You will give your team and yourself a much higher likelihood of succeeding and achieving your asset management goals.

I will be back next week and will move away from asset tagging for a while.  See you next week!!!!