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Asset Heirarchy for rotating part numbers

  • December 23, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 3 views
C

Hi all,

 

I’m working on implementing MaintainX for the first time in our facility. A lot of the software is intuitive, but I’m having some confusion with implementing asset hierarchy for subassemblies that rotate in and out of use. (CPG)

We have two extrusion systems that extrude our product into a panner system. Each extrusion system has a blade that cuts the product into sized bars. We have three different blade sub assemblies that switch on and off extruders based off of availability; when Blade 2 is being cleaned and Blade 1 is in use, Blade 3 will be switched on. Each blade spends time in use and not in use depending on our production schedule.

Would it be easiest to make these their own assets instead of child assets of our extrusion systems? That is what I am leaning towards; attaching one blade as a child asset doesn’t reflect how we actually use our blade.

What do you guys think?

Thank you!

1 reply

Zach Brown
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  • Zach BrownMaintainX Community Team
  • MaintainX Community Team
  • December 31, 2025

Hi ​@Craig Amador. Thanks for sharing these details about your use case and how you’re thinking about your asset hierarchy. When I read this, the first thing that popped into my mind is that this could work with an asset hierarchy (i.e. making each blade sub-assembly a sub-asset of the extrusion system that it belongs to).

You could use custom asset status reasons to record the different stages in state for each blade - e.g. ‘Online: In Use’, ‘Offline: Cleaning’, etc. The status of a sub-asset can be independent of the parent asset. For example, the Extrusion System could be ‘Online’, while its Blade 1 and 3 sub-assets are ‘Online’ and its Blade 2 sub-assembly is ‘Offline” Cleaning’.

One benefit you’ll get by setting this up as an asset hierarchy, is that MaintainX will give you the option to change the status of an asset’s sub-assets in bulk, when you change the status of the parent asset. For example, if you ever take the entire Extrusions System offline, you can easily change the status of all the blade sub-assemblies to offline as well. In contrast, if the blades were independent assets (not set up in a hierarchy), you would have to manually change the status of each blade when you take the extrusion system offline.

If you want to take a cautious approach, you could start by setting up the blade sub-assemblies as independent assets and see how that works. You can always go back and assign them to a parent asset (e.g. an Extrusion System) later on, if you find that you are spending a lot of time manually changing the status of the blades.

Hope this helps!

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