How deep should the equipment hierarchy be? Operators can't find causes on kiosk

[SystemPulse]

Our maintenance team built a very detailed equipment tree on the EQUIPMENT page: Machine > Unit > Assembly > Component, sometimes five levels deep. Now operators on the kiosk have to click through many levels before they see a cause, and on some branches they end up at "This equipment has no cause valid for this machine."
At the same time, maintenance says the detail is needed for their analysis. How do other plants structure this? And why do some branches show no causes even though we defined them?

[Technical Support]

This is a very common situation in the first months. Let's split it into the technical part and the design part.
Why some branches show no causes
Three rules apply in Proveris:
1. Causes are attached to the lowest level of the tree. Equipment that has sub-equipment cannot hold causes.
2. The cause must be valid for the machine: the equipment's machine has to be one of the cause's Station(s).
3. If a leaf has no causes at all, the kiosk shows "This equipment has no cause valid for this machine."
Open Equipment Detail for the affected branches and check the Hierarchy Path and the Causes list. Usually a cause was attached to a parent before children were added, or the station list on the cause is missing that machine.
How deep to go
What works in most plants is two or three levels, for example Machine > Equipment > Sub-equipment, with five to ten causes under each leaf. The operator needs to identify the stop in a few seconds; the detailed root-cause work happens later in maintenance.
Keeping maintenance happy
- Use the Explanation field on the downtime for details the operator knows ("left sensor dirty").
- Use clear Equipment Codes that match your maintenance system, so the two can be linked.
- Review the tree after a month: equipment that never receives a downtime is a candidate for merging.
When you restructure, you can bulk-update the cause links with Import from Excel on the CAUSES page using the equipment codes.
Documentation: https://greensoft.ai/documentation/p...ser-interface/