Defining and categorising assets properly

An asset taxonomy is a structured way for categorising and organising assets into a hierarchy, and aims to provide a standardised way of classifying to help organisations track and manage their assets effectively, make informed decisions about investments and divestments, enabling them to accurately report on their financial performance. If you neglect your asset hierarchies, you're inviting inefficiency, poor service delivery, and financial penalties. Rubbish in... Rubbish out!

The underlying issues with asset registers in FM

Does your asset hierarchy enforce consistent naming conventions across all sites and systems in your asset register? Imagine you're tracking faults across multiple sites and systems, but there's no standard way of recording assets. If an asset is logged as "Air Handling Unit 1" in one system and "AHU_01" in another, then your asset hierarchy is already broken.

Where to start?

• Audit what you already have: look at your existing data, identify inconsistencies, duplicates and missing details.
• Define a clear hierarchy: use structured, standardised asset categories and taxonomies like Uniclass and NRM.
• Work with experienced mechanical and electrical asset surveying organisations to improve the quality of your asset data and understand your buildings better.

These M&E asset surveying organisations will typically use asset data capture software like Mobiess Asset Inspector as the mobile tool to perform data collection and QA services. High quality data in asset registers are more crucial than ever in today's market - and utilising data-driven mobile-first asset data collection software allows organisations to build strong consistent asset registers that stand up to scrutiny.

Simply put, free-text kills data quality.

While it's necessary in some cases, if overused (which it often is), it creates a messy unstructured method of data collection, leading to inconsistent responses across teams, increased difficulty in analysing reports, and more errors such as spelling mistakes.

A widespread problem

When logging issues and defects, imagine having to manually write out locations, descriptions and defects every single time, for every single issue. You're spending hours logging the same task, the same issue - repeating yourself over and over again.

You can streamline the majority of these processes - review what you already have, and standardise the collated information into something useful to improve your productivity.

Where to start

Think about how you can enhance what you have, not just copy the same word document onto a digital system. Review the processes you have, technology you use, and then how you display this - what's the outcome: radio button options, data-driven picklists. 

Spreadsheets and paper can't enforce structure, but technology like Mobiess can - utilise a digital system and make sure structured data collection is the only option across your organisation.

It's not about replicating what you have. It's about taking a step forward and actually improving the way you capture, QA and manage data.

Stop capturing everything, start capturing what matters. More data does not equal better data.

Some teams collect too much data which they'll never use, others collect too little, missing what actually matters. Don't confuse volume with value - this can lead to chaotic asset registers, wasted time and wasted effort, irrelevant data in reports, a "not quite golden thread" of compliance. 

Focus on purpose-built structured data capture, using a reliable data capture software provider.

Is all of your data actually useful?

Whether it's inspections, asset surveys or work orders, every field collected, should contribute towards compliance, operational decisions or meeting customer requirements. Often enough the data you collect will be used downstream in reporting or CAFM systems, feeding trend analysis and issue resolution.

It's not about collecting data "just in case", it's about capturing meaningful information that supports specific structured outcomes. If it's not useful, don't waste your time collecting it. Using hierarchical and rules-based asset data capture software like Mobiess helps you define the exact fields needed across multiple sites, projects, systems and asset types.

Stop cutting corners

Don't starve your systems of the data it needs, just to cut costs. It's a common issue across the FM industry that organisations don't collect good quality data. It's often substandard, or "of limited use". Ensure that the right data is captured at the right time, by the right people, in the right way.

The value of data lies in its relevance, consistency and accuracy. Not it's quantity.

Preparing your data for end use. Data collection isn't the goal, usability is.

Hand over a database rather than an excel file. Consider what format your client wants the data in, and what they want to achieve. Encapsulate all the asset data and photo evidence together 

Do they want to analyse the data for forward maintenance registers, identify remedial works or gain a summary of assets by condition, risk or criticality? 

Educating your CAFM system

A CAFM system is only as smart as the data you feed it. Have you considered it feeding it FMR data, lifecycle data, hazard data, permits required information, and any immediate repair information? CAFM and IWMS systems need to be continuously educated, make sure you're constantly updating it with accurate information.

Data Maintenance

Don't wait for handbacks or audits to start updating your asset register. Spread the risk by carrying out asset audits as part of your operational processes. Empower your engineers with the right tools and data collection software to perform asset condition verification or validation exercises, and inspections with ease, whenever they're on site - 1 audit every 5 years is not fit for purpose any more.