How To Streamline Your Equipment Tags and Take Them To The Next Level

Is your company struggling to implement an effective process for allocating equipment tags? If so, you’re not alone. Managing huge numbers of equipment tags to identify and track assets can be overwhelming. They must be unique, informative and well organized. Although most companies have implemented some sort of process, it may be doing more harm than good. Unfortunately for many organizations, their processes have resulted in inconsistent, duplicate, missing, and out of date tags.

Does This Sound Like You?

Most companies begin by using simple tools such as spreadsheets to track the next available sequence numbers to keep the tags unique. Others use a tagging database to track the sequence numbers, but may experience delays waiting for an administrator to assign them. These home-grown systems are not only error prone, a seemingly inexpensive solution becomes costly due to the administrative overhead.

There are a number of companies that use naming conventions for their tags. This information makes it easier to identify and track equipment throughout its lifecycle. However, companies still need a system in place to enforce them. Again, a manual system becomes cumbersome and difficult to enforce.

Efficiency- The Ultimate Goal

The daily operations of asset-intensive companies depend strongly on the performance of their physical assets and this constitutes a significant portion of their operating expense. The equipment tag can be used to capture useful information, but it’s only useful if it’s easy to decode. Hence, the need for a naming convention is paramount. Unfortunately, there are no industry standards for tagging equipment. Each organization must find and define what works best for them. No matter what, the most important point to identify once you’ve defined a convention, is that it’s easy to implement and follow. In other words, efficiency is key!

What do companies using NRX AssetHub do to manage tags?

NRX AssetHub provides a single, web-based solution accessible from any browser, making it easy to request tags. It provides forms that prevent invalid selections or mistyped entries, and assigns tags upon request. The system also ensures that the tags are valid and unique, avoiding duplicate tags. Furthermore, NRX AssetHub loads tag data from any existing database or spreadsheet and from EAM systems. It automatically determines the next available block of sequence numbers, and allocates them as requests are submitted.

What are the Key Benefits?

By implementing a process to manage tags, your organization will:

• Easily conform to corporate standards for tagging assets in a meaningful manner
• Avoid human errors and delays that can result in costly retagging or mistagged assets
• Automatically ensure tags are complete, unique, and approved
• Speed up the allocation of tags