Creating the right number of tags and labeling them in specific and intuitive ways will help your team to easily tag all downtime events so you can accurately identify root causes. Creating too many tags makes it difficult for them to select the right one and could lead to selecting the wrong tags or not tagging events at all. Creating too few tags might lead to downtime reasons that are too broad to take action on.

In this article we’ll explain how to create the right set of tags for your organization.

Identify the primary reasons why machines go down in your operation. Ideally, you should start with no more than 20 tags. If you’ve been using manual logs to record downtime, looking through the last few months of records should give you a good sense of your top 15-20 reasons. If you haven’t been recording this information, we recommend starting with a core set like the one below. Make the labels for each tag as specific as possible so your team knows exactly what they mean and there’s no need for interpretation.

If you want to further reduce the number of tags from the list above, you can consolidate some (e.g., “Startup/Shutdown”, “Shutdown/Cleaning”, “Late start/Early stop”, “Breakdown” instead of Mechanical+Electrical+Jam, etc.)

Guidewheel will automatically associate the machine and date/time with a tagged event, so it’s unnecessary to build machine/sub-assembly names or locations into the tag names.

Once you’ve defined a core set of tags, train your team on what each tag means and when it applies. You want to make sure that every person who will be tagging understands the difference between each of your tags and doesn’t have to guess which tag to use when a downtime event occurs. As your team gets started tagging, it’s useful to have visual aids, like a laminated card with tag names and their meanings, next to the stations where they’ll be adding tags.

Limit the number of tags an operator or supervisor can select from by filtering tags by device. A device is a machine, sub-assembly, auxiliary piece of equipment or anything that Guidewheel is clipped onto. This allows you to show only the tags that are relevant to a specific device as options to be selected. This makes it easier for your team to select the right tags and is particularly useful as your overall set of tags grows over time. Learn how to filter tags by device in this article.

You will likely identify the need to add additional tags over time. This might be because you want to get more granular around a specific issue. For example, instead of just tagging an issue as “mechanical” you might want to capture the specific type of mechanical issue or part of the machine that failed. It might also be because you discover additional root causes for downtime that weren’t represented in your original tag set.

Either way, we recommend having a process for creating new tags and auditing your tag set periodically to keep it manageable. Only tags that are actively used and relevant to your current processes should be retained.