Let’s Talk About Asset Framework (AF)
If you’re using PI and not tapping into Asset Framework, you’re honestly missing out. A lot of folks set it up just to organize PI Vision displays and leave it at that. But AF is more than just a fancy way to group tags it’s where things really start to click in terms of context, structure, and automation.
Most used only for PI Vision setup
That’s probably the most common use case: build a hierarchy, make your PI Vision dashboards look cleaner. But AF can do a lot more than make dashboards pretty. It’s the foundation for standardizing how you model equipment, do calculations, set up events, and trigger alerts and once you’ve built it out, you can reuse that logic across your entire operation.
Eliminate the calculation tag, saving money on tag usage
This one’s big. Every time you create a new PI tag for a calc, it adds to your tag count and depending on your license, that can get expensive. With AF, you can run calculations directly in the framework. You only store the results if you need them long-term. That means fewer tags, less clutter, and more efficient use of your license.
Set up events and structure alarms
AF also lets you define event conditions and alarms based on real-world logic not just raw tag values. Think about things like “compressor run hours over 500” or “temperature exceeded limit for 10 minutes.” You can structure those rules and have the system track, alert, and even generate reports around them. It’s cleaner, more reliable, and easier to manage over time.
With a proper AF hierarchy in place…
This is where the magic happens. If you take the time to build your AF hierarchy to match how your facility actually works — site > unit > asset > component, you make it easier for everyone to find and use data. Engineers, operators, analysts can all get what they need because the data is organized in a way that makes sense. And when something goes wrong? You’ve already got the structure in place to send alerts to the right folks, automatically.
Any team member can receive email alerts about changes
Set it up once, and you can push notifications to maintenance, ops, engineering, whoever needs to know. Whether it’s a fault, an out-of-range condition, or an upcoming service threshold, AF + Notifications + Event Frames make sure the right people stay in the loop.
Bottom Line
If you’re already collecting good PI data, Asset Framework is where you unlock the real value. It turns your data into something useful, something actionable without bogging down your system or ballooning your tag count. It’s worth the time to get it right.
📧 Need help implementing this in your plant or facility?
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