How do you plan a tagging scheme for a fleet?

Put no meaning in the number

The temptation is a readable scheme: site, then building, then department, then a sequence. It looks organised and it is legible to a human.

Every element of it is a fact about the asset at one moment. Sites close, buildings are renamed, departments merge, and assets move between all three.

When that happens, either the identifier becomes wrong or every tag has to be replaced. Both outcomes are worse than a number that never meant anything.

An opaque identifier cannot become wrong, because it never asserted anything.

Why clever schemes fail

They fail slowly, which is what makes them dangerous. For two years the scheme is accurate and everyone trusts it.

Then a reorganisation happens and a proportion of identifiers describe a structure that no longer exists. Nobody relabels, because relabelling means visiting every asset.

Now the fleet contains identifiers that are right and identifiers that are wrong, indistinguishable from each other, and people go on reading meaning out of them.

The same applies to encoding the asset type. Equipment is repurposed more often than schemes anticipate.

Designing the identifier

Opaque, fixed length, and not sequential. A sequence tells anyone who reads one tag roughly how many assets you have and lets them guess neighbours.

Long enough that it will not run out, and short enough to keep the written address small.

Where the chip mirrors its own identifier, use that as the identifier and skip the design question entirely. It is unique, opaque and already on the tag.

And keep it separate from any number printed on the tag face for humans, which can be readable and meaningful because it is easy to reprint.

The register is the deliverable

The mapping between identifiers and assets is the actual asset of the project. The tags are consumables and the register is not.

It must be exportable in a form you can read without the software that created it, because that software will be replaced during the life of the tags.

It must record when each tag was fitted and replaced, which is what tells you whether the physical specification is right.

And it must survive the person who built it. A scheme that only one person understands is a scheme that ends when they leave, and asset tags outlive employment.