Key takeaways
Short answer: An asset hierarchy is the structural map of your equipment — site to area to line to machine to component — and it is how the CMMS organises history and work. Asset criticality is a ranking of each asset by failure consequence, used to set maintenance strategy. The hierarchy tells you what exists and how it connects; criticality tells you what matters most. Build the hierarchy first. See also why asset tags matter more than people think.
You cannot rank what you have not mapped. A clean hierarchy gives every asset a place to attach work, cost, and criticality. Rank before you map and the ranking floats free of real equipment.
The hierarchy organises; criticality prioritises. Together they tell maintenance where to focus and let OEE roll up from component to line to plant correctly.
OEE rolls up the asset hierarchy, weighted by where the critical constraints sit. A clean hierarchy plus criticality is what makes plant-level OEE meaningful rather than an average of unlike things.
See how Fabrico captures this automatically on your lines — explore OEE for manufacturing or book a demo.
The hierarchy — you must map before you rank.
Failure consequence: safety, production, cost, lead time.
Yes — it is how history and cost attach to assets.
It lets OEE roll up correctly across the plant.