Master class: Assets made easy

Okay, hi everyone. So today we're going to be covering the Asset Hub. We're going to be looking at how we can make the most out of the Asset Hub and particularly the right way to set the Asset Hub up, thinking about how we've designed the application to be structured so that when setting up your assets or wanting to move things onto the Asset Hub later, which is fundamentally the best way to do this.

So, as always, we're going to get started just going into our presentation. I will share my screen in just a moment. Best practice when setting it up—I'm going to talk you through how to, in the correct order, go from the setup, understanding how to get all your assets organized, all the way to downloading the templates and then uploading them via Excel so that you can set up your Asset Hub quite quickly. And then looking at the data that we have on the platform and how you can look at it and how you can use it to understand what's going on with your assets. We also are going to talk to you a little bit more about the things to come on Asset Hub as well.

So just to take everyone through the fundamentals of Asset Hub, we're just going to show you this page. So if you've already been a part of the Asset Hub setup or one of our support plans, we might have sent you this document already that breaks it into the Asset Hub structure visually so you can understand how it works and how access works. I'm just going to show everyone this now so that if you're new to Q-Hub or you're looking at Q-Hub and you want to know if this is going to work for you, this will help give you an idea of how we structure the application.

So essentially in the Asset Hub we break different things into categories and then that helps you to organize your assets in as simple a way as we can make it. So to start with we have the key feature of profiles. A profile is just a way of categorizing your assets. For example, you can see here we've called some apps. So it might be machines, gauges, tools, vehicles, and these are used to assign different things or attributes or items to a set of assets. So what I mean by that: let's say we had a load of cars that you wanted to manage the inspections on the cars and maybe be able to do a spot check on the fleet of vehicles that you own. So all of those cars have a few things in common. You're going to want to capture the model. You might want to capture the registration number. You want to add a weekly check on the cars. That type of thing. So they would all come under the profile of vehicles or cars. And then you can set up those sort of individual pieces of data that you want to capture, and that will be the same for all of the cars that you then add to that profile.

Another example might be something more complicated like gauges. So at times you may need to capture multiple gauges in one go. So what I mean by that is there's certain items that are very similar even though they might actually be different. So you may have gauges like a plug gauge and then you have another gauge which might be, let's say, a block of slips or it could even be a pressure gauge. So at times you have different assets or different types of profile. So you might want to understand: do we do one profile to cover all of them or would we do separate profiles there? And the answer really is: it depends on what information and what you want to do with the assets or with the gauges in this example.

So if you have a gauge that needs to have annual calibration and maybe some maintenance and maybe an internal check, and then you have another type of gauge like a plug gauge that doesn't require maintenance and calibration, you could still fit them all under the gauge profile and apply a task to just some of the gauges and not others. But the best practice is: when there's a key difference in activities or what you're doing, you would split those up. So you might have a plug gauge profile, and then that way on the plug gauge profile you would have a field to record the diameter because that's kind of specific to a plug gauge. Whereas on a pressure gauge, it might be: what is the approved PSI or bar that that gauge goes up to. So you can see there's subtle differences even though they're all gauges that you would want to capture per asset.

So that is the profile and sort of how you can think about how a profile should be set up and used. And then the next thing to think about is the groups, locations, and status and management tasks. So the groups are a way of you being able to filter or categorize your assets further. A classic example we use for this quite a lot is: within your business, you're likely to have lots of different assets, but different departments might be responsible for managing those. So for example, you may have lifting equipment or you might have some items like first aid boxes that someone is responsible for checking and making sure they've got all the correct items within it. And then you also might have engineering types of assets like we talked about with the machines, gauges, it could be tooling.

So what we want to do there is you can have all of the profiles for the type of asset that you're managing, but then we can group them using the groups feature. So you might have a group called health and safety. And that health and safety group would be applied to things like your first aid box profile, your lifting equipment profile, your any other health and safety type of asset or profile. And this helps to filter the different views and we can even control access based on the groups, which I'll go into shortly.

Now, another obvious one for assets is you're going to want to be able to pick the location that the asset is stored or the home of that asset. This can be as high a level as just the site that the asset is on or into sub-locations. So you might want to know: for a site and then specifically for a building and then a cabinet and a drawer if you wanted to manage the assets to that level. And again we can control the access via locations as well. And when I say control the access, what I mean is: who can see those assets through Q-Hub as a system.

So we also have asset statuses. Okay, so an asset status by default on Q-Hub we have the okay status, overdue, a recall status, quarantine, and then we can also add custom statuses. So a custom status might be something like out for calibration or safe to use or defective in use. So there's different types of statuses and this is really just to help make things look similar to the way that you internally refer to the status of your assets, just to make things as clear as possible so that when you're looking at all of your different assets and what the status of them is, it's in terminology that's familiar to you.

We also then have the management tasks. So we'll come on to this a lot later, but essentially the management tasks are things that you need to do for those assets on a regular basis. And all of those different groups, locations, the status, and the tasks, they all are assigned to every asset. So every single asset will have to have a group, location, the status, and tasks applied to it. And the assets will fall under the profile. And that not only helps us to organize your assets, but it also helps us to actually control who can see the different assets.

So just to show you this page to maybe help you visualize it: so if you imagine we have an asset example here, it might be a pressure gauge for a particular type of check that you perform. This would be under the profile of gauges, or it could be pressure gauges as we said earlier, and then it might be group A. So group A in this scenario may be engineering, and then it could be location one. So what this means is: if you have a profile gauge and a group A, we can have access settings on this. So profile gauges might only be accessible to the engineering group. And then group A might only be accessible to your calibration engineers. And then the location allows you to pick people or groups of people who are assigned to this location.

So the combination of these access settings allows you to create very clever but also very simple ways of managing who can see what, because we don't want to bombard your users with too many assets that they don't need to worry about. So for example, a user may have access to profiles because he's an engineer. He might also have access to a specific group. Therefore, he would have access to this pressure gauge. And if this user is also found in, let's say, shop floor location one, and the asset is assigned to location one, he would have visibility of this asset. But let's say this user was not part of the location one group. He would tick the first two access options, but once it got to the location setting, he wouldn't be let through. Therefore, the asset would be hidden.

So if you imagine you have different sites or different departments, you might have gauges that are stored in all different locations. And if a user is assigned to the correct location, they're only going to see the profiles and gauges or the assets within that location. But if that engineer changed role and moved into a different site and you added him to that site's group, he would then see the same types of assets but for the different location. So hopefully that explains a little bit about how the control and the access works.

So the next thing that we're going to talk about is how you set up the asset and the best way to do this. So just a key point: if we've got clean data in, you get a clean and effective system. So what I mean by clean data is data that you know is accurate, that is consistent, and that has been validated by yourself to ensure that that is the correct dates, formats, and organization of your assets prior to uploading it onto Q-Hub.

This can be a real challenge at times because in real life the asset management, um, part of the reason customers want to come onto Q-Hub is to improve their asset management which by default might mean that their current asset management maybe has some problems or it's very complicated in the way they're doing it currently. So there can be a bit of a learning curve or a bit of friction from going from where you are currently onto the Asset Hub and system. And it doesn't always work perfectly to be totally honest, but in reality that is the situation when moving to a new system and not having clean data.

So we try and help all of our customers as much as possible when it comes to moving the asset system on. We've worked with lots of different clients. Some they've got all of their asset data in spreadsheets and it's all accurate and good and we help them load it on and it works perfectly straight away. Other larger sites might have tens of thousands of assets or in the realms of that, and they have lots of different assets that they're trying to onboard at different times and they don't know all of the dates that the assets are next due. So that can take a little bit more work and a little bit more teething to get it set up and up and running. But as part of the setup process, we try and help as much as possible with that as well.

But once you've got sort of clean data, the steps that you want to try and think about before using Asset Hub or if you're going to upload new assets are as follows. So the first thing you want to do is understand your asset profiles and what the asset profiles should be. So for example, I talked earlier about different types of profiles. Other systems that you use for asset management, or even a lot of customers I've seen with Excel spreadsheets that they used to use to manage assets, they may already have this. It might be a column in your Excel or in an older system that breaks the assets down into different things. You know, it could be water coolers, then calibration equipment, plug gauges, checks, fixtures, all those types of sort of categories. Think about those, list them down, and then that's the first port of call. So list all of the different profiles down that you want on the system.

The next thing you want to do is for each of those profiles, think about the activities that you want to do for those assets. So this is before uploading any of the assets to the system. The best way to do this is to think about your profiles. So it could be, let's say as we've talked about, gauges: you just need to do a three-monthly quick check by the shop floor that the gauge is working properly and there's no signs of damage, and then you also want to have a calibration, an annual calibration on the asset as well on the gauge. So those are two different types of things. So you might use a task for one of them where you just want a simple task for someone to confirm they've checked the asset and take a picture. And then you might want a form to be used to capture the calibration record, the date, the calibration body that inspected the asset as well.

So create all of those management tasks next. Then what you do on the system: you create the profiles, you set up all the management tasks, and you assign the management tasks to the profiles. That essentially gives you the template of the system. Now once that's done, you then download the profile template and it gives it to you in a nice and easy spreadsheet format. You add your data from wherever you've got it. Again, this is where that clean data really makes a big difference. Even things like if you're assigning an asset owner—so whoever is responsible or in charge of the asset—that asset owner needs to be a user on the system. Otherwise it will assign the assets to the person who uploads it because it needs a user on the system. So just lots of little things like that that we can try and cover with you on the onboarding or during asset setup. But it's just good to have in mind beforehand.

So make sure the people who are going to be involved in asset management are on the platform already. Make sure the profiles are set up. Make sure the tasks are set up. Download the template. And if all of that has been done effectively, you can just upload your data from the profile template, which is an Excel file, straight in, and it will set up all your assets one profile at a time. Nice and easy. Once you've done that, you can then verify and make any tweaks that you need to, and then run the system from that point on.

So what I'm going to do next, I'm just going to share with you in a bit more detail how we can actually do some of those things. So we're going to go onto the platform and I'm going to start to show you how you would set your asset system up, and we're going to work through an example as well. So if you just bear with me, I move a few screens around. Okay, so you should all be seeing my health and safety homepage, but what we're interested in today is of course the assets.

So this is the Asset Hub homepage. It gives you some quick KPIs—so task performance on your assets, the status of your assets, and then the planned tasks that are coming up for your assets. We want to look at today. I want to focus on a few sort of common examples that Asset Hub users use—like I said, calibration and understanding how the management task works. So what I'm going to do: I'm going to go to my profiles page. You can see the types of examples we have here. And now what I'm going to do: I'm going to go into my gauge profile.

So you can see the gauges profile page. It shows me the list of assets that we have. We've only got one gauge at the minute added. It shows me my task tracker. So these are all of the planned tasks for this gauge in the next 90 days. You can see for example here we have an annual calibration that's been sent today and it's also due today—that is in preparation for this session—and it shows us the asset status at this point in time as well. Then we have the reports and schedule page. So this shows you similar KPIs to the homepage, but it gives it specifically for the assets under this profile. So it sort of helps you dig into it a little bit more.

And if you scroll down to the bottom, you'll see an asset schedule. And this shows you the different assets and where they fit into as well. So what we're going to do, we're going to go back to the assets. And I'm going to actually tap on the asset itself to show you. So on the asset we have our profile picture, we have the status, we have the management status and the booking status. This is really important.

I'll just quickly sort of deal here and show and explain these statuses and how that works so that it really can sort of give you an idea of why we've done this in this way. So the overall asset status is like your overarching: is this asset okay? Is there any problems with it? Then we have the management status. So this is about your tasks, the management tasks status. You can see at the moment this is marked as overdue because there's something that needs to be done on this asset that is not yet been done. We also have the booking status. So this means: is it available for someone to come up to the asset, scan the QR code and click book out so that they can assign it to a specific person?

The reason we have separated the overall status to the management task status is because of the different uses that Asset Hub has. For example, you might have a large CNC machine and you add that to the Asset Hub. And as part of that, when you have the machine, there might be something like an annual inspection on the machine. And if that goes overdue, you want the overall asset status to be marked as overdue automatically, which is fine and it makes sense because you don't want people to use an overdue machine that hasn't had an annual calibration or maintenance check.

However, there may be things like monthly checks—like a coolant check or something like that—where you just want to indicate: is there a management task that's overdue? Yes. Is the overall asset still okay to use? Yes. So in theory everything should always be done on time, but in real life we know sometimes there's some certain activities that are more best practice that shouldn't stop the use of the asset, and we wouldn't want the system to indicate otherwise. So that's just an example of how that can be used.

So what I'm going to do: I'm going to go to the management task section. You can see here on this pressure gauge there's two types of management tasks that have been set up. We have a task which is a maintenance check. You can see that this has been assigned to myself and it's overdue—it's due on the 31st of July—and it's obviously overdue, which is why the management status says that it is overdue.

However, we also have the annual calibration management task. You can see here that this is scheduled for every 365 days. So far, three have been sent and two have been completed. And it shows me this detail in this little box here. It shows me all of the annual calibrations that have been done so far. I can tap on one of them. I can see the calibration records. I can see the person who calibrated it. And I can see the calibration certificate. Let's say it was from an external body or there's a software you use to calibrate things and you just want to upload it to the system. It stores that all here as well.

So if there is an asset like this one that is calibrated, you'll see it has sent the annual calibration task. If I open the calibration task, you can see that this now has been linked to the asset. Okay, so for those who don't know—who already have Q-Hub—it's really important that you add in to any forms or tasks that you're doing the field which is the asset field. This allows you to directly link it into the asset. It can help you to quickly see the asset info at a glance or take you—using a shortcut button—go to the asset if you want more information about it. And it also allows you to change the status of the asset here as well. So it's very helpful for when you're planning a calibration and you want to be able to update the asset status at the same time.

So we'll just leave that one like this. Now what I also wanted to show you is how the asset field can help to identify other things that are happening with your assets. So I'm going to go back to my profile. I'm going to go to my machinery. I'm going to go to my JCB digger, and we're going to go into the asset work. So this is an interesting case. Okay, so what this shows you is that we've had a monthly maintenance check carried out on the calibration, but this is currently still not finished. So the asset work page shows you everything that this asset has been mentioned on within Q-Hub system. Okay, we can see that there has been a calibration that has been completed and we can also see an accident and near miss that's been completed.

So just to help sort of clarify this further: the only management task—the only thing that we're saying—needs to be done on this asset on a regular basis is this six-monthly calibration, monthly maintenance task. You can see I've got a task. We can see that many of them were due and have been completed on time. And now we obviously haven't done the latest one, but you can see that's indicated with the overdue, hence the overdue status here. But it appears like something else has happened. So if I click my accident and near miss report form, you can see that this is an accident form that has been filled out, and at a certain point they have mentioned that the equipment was involved in an accident. Yes. So they popped open the asset field and asked them to pick the asset.

So you can see with Asset Hub and the asset field, there's two ways to link things to the asset in terms of tasks or activities that need to be done. You have the management tasks. So whenever a management task is set up—for example, if I create a new one and we wanted to say this JCB now needs to be calibrated—I can go to my annual calibration template and I can add that. And then I can go into my calibration schedule and say that this needs to be done every 365 days and it's actually next due on December the 31st. Unfortunately, someone is going to be working then. And we can save that. And then if you give it a moment, this will update to show to reflect that change. And calibration is now scheduled.

So when the calibration task is sent, what it's going to do, it's going to link that calibration form to the asset automatically because it is an asset management task. Now on the other side, if we go to the Form Hub and let's say we have something like our, if I go into my accident form. So in my accident and near miss form, if I go versions just to show you what I've done here. You can see we've got the event details of the form. And if I scroll down, we've added a question: was any equipment involved in the accident? And we've picked yes or no. If they pick yes, we've added some hide-show logic to pick the asset. So now it will pop open with the Asset Hub field and they can select the asset that was involved in the accident.

I'll show you how this looks on the web app. Obviously on the mobile app it works as well. So we click add an entry. We scroll down. Was a vehicle included? If I pick no, nothing happens. If I pick yes, it pops open the Asset Hub and then we can search for the asset like so. Something we're adding later is the QR code ability on the mobile. So that directly from this field, you can click the QR code button, scan the asset. So in future, a big part of what we're working with is that integration between the real life assets—sort of the physical world—and how we can make best use of that. We're looking at integrations into RFID chips so that we can track assets as well. But holistically is what we really focus on: the ability to connect your assets throughout the Q-Hub system.

So if you think you might have a non-conformance—so there might be a non-conformance form. So if I go to an NCR form like this, and we actually want to start tracking any assets involved in our non-conformances. So let's say we had a customer non-conformance. We can pick any, if I go into the corrective actions or the root cause, we might add a question in here. So: was root cause, was there any assets involved in the root cause? For example, it could be a faulty gauge, it could be a faulty piece of equipment. We click pick a type, we pick assets, and now when this is next filled out they will be able to link their assets to this and therefore in the Asset Hub under a specific asset.

So if I go to my pressure gauge, if we fill out a non-conformance and within that field we've selected an asset, in the asset work you are now going to see the non-conformance record against the asset. So that asset where it really works is basically a history of anything mentioned for the asset. So that's a few cool things to do with Asset Hub. But just briefly before we wrap up, I just want to show you a few different tables to make sure you understand how you can work with the asset data.

So if I go to my asset page, we've got the tile view, and then you can swap that into the table view for better sort of data review. And there's a few different things you can do. You can download all of the assets regularly—so we get a download option—or if you want to change the asset owners en masse, you can also download the template which allows you to download and edit things and re-upload it. But for the assets table itself, if you just collapse this page: so there's some key information here. You can see we've got the profile, the groups, the locations. So let's say you worked on the Bristol site most of the time. You could filter the location by Bristol.

Let's also say you weren't really worried about seeing the asset field. So we want to hide that. We just want to know the owner. And we're only focused on what's overdue. So I can click filter and I can select overdue. That gives us a very quick and simple view of things, doesn't it? We can quickly see for the Bristol site what is overdue. So now we can click save this field. Call it a public field so everyone can use this setting, and we can say "Overdue Bristol." Click save. And now when you log back into Asset Hub you can go "display all my assets" or very quickly: "I just want to see what's overdue on the Bristol site." And I can even click the star and make that the default for when I log in.

And now once you start getting into the dashboards and all the rest of the Q-Hub features, this really comes in handy. Let's say for example we go to our homepage and we go to, let's say, one of our workspaces. So quality and engineering. Go back. And what we want to do is have a quick button on the quality and engineering page to see any overdue assets at one click away so we can get to them. So I go edit. I can have a shortcut to a specific view. And I want to go to my overdue Bristol assets. Click done. Add that into our dashboard.

My OCD is making me want to change this, but we'll carry on. So now if anyone on your engineering and quality team who have access to this workspace taps "overdue Bristol assets," it's going to take them straight to Asset Hub, straight to the Bristol and overdue filter. So they can quickly see it here and then they can see the due dates. They might tap on the asset itself. It will show them the schedule on when things should have been done. They can see that's not been started yet. So they can tap it open and then they can mark it as complete, add some comments, whatever they need to do on the assets to manage them.

So just to wrap up, I'm just going to open my dashboard again—not my dashboard, my presentation—and just talk you through what we want to focus on next. So if you have assets and you're already a customer, if you've set up your profiles or you think maybe you've done some of this wrong, it might be an opportunity—if you haven't already done tasks—to sort of clean it out, redo some of your profiles, or upload some of your data.

If you need a bit more advanced help and you're on a support plan, so feel free to bring it up on the next session and ask us how we can help to clean or set up your Asset Hub and all of the dashboards to help your calibration team, to help your engineering or production team, or your business admins to really understand the best way to set Asset Hub up, the best way to set the dashboards up so that you can have an easy system and something that really helps on a day-to-day basis to see what you need to do.

Because there's lots of other features we've not yet touched on. We are going to do a part two of Asset Hub because it is quite quite a beast and there's a lot that people can use on it. So in the next session we're going to cover more of the reporting, how we get analytics, how we understand where the assets have been and what we want to be able to show in sort of like a management review of the assets as well.

But yeah, feel free to drop any messages to us after this. You can email the support email or you can raise a help ticket if you've got any questions as well. So if you're not a Q-Hub customer and you're wondering if Asset Hub could work for you, or maybe a company that you know, potentially you're a partner and you're looking to help one of your clients have an asset management system and you'd like to know if this is something that could work for them, so please get in contact. You can either drop a message on whatever you're viewing this on—this video—or please just send an email to sales@qhub.co.uk.

So thank you for joining. Thank you for watching the Asset presentation. Next in two weeks' time there's going to be a master class on Audit Hub. And then we will be releasing our September and October webinar schedule in full. So that's really going to help us with your asset systems and managing that correctly. So we'd like to thank everyone for joining and I will see you on the next webinar.

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