Asset groups in Enterprise Asset Management

Asset groups in the Enterprise Asset Management application provide a systematic approach to organizing assets based on their functional relationships and their physical placement within an organization. They can help improve data integrity and support maintenance planning, life-cycle tracking, reporting, and access control.

Organization of assets in Enterprise Asset Management

In the Enterprise Asset Management application, assets are organized through the following hierarchy types:

• Location hierarchy: Hierarchy that defines the physical locations of your assets, organized based on the real-world location structure of those assets. This hierarchy enables location-based filtering, maintenance routing, and reporting.
• Asset groups: Logical groupings of related assets and subgroups. Each asset group represents a functional system, process, or department within your organization.
• Asset structure: Hierarchy that defines the parent-child relationships between assets. This hierarchy can help you complete work on your assets, plan spare parts, and track your asset life cycles.

Overview of asset groups

An asset group is a logical grouping of assets. Each asset group can have multiple subgroups; however, a subgroup can belong to only one asset group. An asset can belong to multiple groups.

For details on creating asset groups and subgroups, see Create an asset group in Enterprise Asset Management and Create an asset subgroup in Enterprise Asset Management. For details on adding assets to asset groups, see Add assets to an asset group or subgroup.

Note:

A subgroup inherits some fields from its parent group. For details on the fields that get inherited, see Fields inherited from a parent asset group to a sub group.

Sites in asset groups

A site is an ISA-95 hierarchical entity model. Sites are organized in a hierarchical structure, with site being the top-level entity, followed by area, work center, and work unit.

You can associate an asset group to a site. This association enables all CIs that are associated with that specific site to also associate with the asset group.

Note:

Only assets from the associated site and its specific location can be added to the asset group.

For details on creating sites, see Create a site in the Enterprise Asset Management application.

Service instances and asset groups

An asset group or subgroup can optionally reference a service instance to pull all related assets from a chosen node in the given CI hierarchy. A subgroup can reference a service instance only if its parent group references one.

Considerations for asset groups

Keep the following considerations in mind for asset groups:

• An asset group can’t contain itself as a subgroup.
• An asset group can’t have a model or model category, as it's a separate entity.
• An asset group can't be deleted if it contains subgroups or assets. To delete an asset group, the sn_eam.enterprise_asset_manager or the sn_eam.enterprise_admin role must first remove any subgroups and assets from the asset group.

Considerations for adding assets to asset groups

Keep the following considerations in mind while adding assets to asset groups:

• You can add only assets without a parent.​
• You can add only hardware and enterprise assets. You can't add any consumable assets, linear assets, linear segments, or pallet assets.
• Assets must be in the same location as the asset group or in a descendent location.
• Asset must be in the In use or In maintenance state.​​

Considerations for asset groups in Enterprise Asset Management flows and capabilities

Asset groups are unavailable in the following Enterprise Asset Management flows and capabilities:

• Asset resale flow
• Transfer order line management
• Repair order line management
• Disposal order management
• Shipment asset creation
• Contract management
• Move order management
• Any flow where the asset requires a model

Plugin dependencies for asset groups

Asset groups require the sn_isa_model plugin, which is automatically installed with the Enterprise Asset Management application.