In maintenance vocabulary, an asset is anything that a maintenance team owns the upkeep of. This is broader than "machinery" — it includes vehicles, IT infrastructure, building systems, food service equipment, medical devices, and anything else that depreciates, can fail, and requires regular attention.
A maintenance team's job is to keep its assets in service. Everything else (work orders, procedures, parts, schedules) exists to make that easier.
What a CMMS records about an asset
- Identity: name, serial number, manufacturer, model.
- Location: where it physically lives.
- Criticality: how disruptive its failure would be (high, medium, low).
- Status: operational, in maintenance, decommissioned.
- History: every work order that has ever touched it.
- Documents: manuals, warranties, photos.
- PM schedule: which preventive jobs apply and how often.
Asset criticality
Not every asset deserves equal attention. A failing main production line stops the whole operation; a failing parking-lot light stops nothing. Maintenance teams classify assets by criticality so that the limited supply of technician time goes to the equipment where it matters most.
The usual scheme is high / medium / low, sometimes with numeric tiers (1 to 5). High-criticality assets get more frequent PMs, more spare parts on hand, and faster response when they fail.
Asset hierarchy
Assets often live in hierarchies: a production line contains machines, which contain components, which contain parts. A good CMMS lets you model this tree so that history and PMs cascade naturally — you can see all the work done on a single bearing, on the machine that holds it, or on the line as a whole.