Secondary States
For the utilisation system to work, each asset should have a state, such as 'running' or 'stopped'. This is known as the primary state.
It can also have a secondary state, which provides more detail or context to the state information. For example, if your primary state is 'Moving', your secondary state might be the location of the asset - explaining where the movement is taking place.
The secondary state does not have to be consistent between your different primary states. For example, it's possible to have the following…
| Primary State | Secondary State |
|---|---|
| Travelling | Location |
| Delayed | Reason |
| Breakdown | Cause |
| Unavailable | Category |
The secondary status is usually used to answer simple who/what/where/when questions about the primary status.
You should choose a secondary status that should answers the users most common questions around the different states when performing analytics. For stops/downtimes/unavailability, people will mostly be concerned about why. During normal operation, their questions are more likely to be around what the assets were doing, or where they were doing it.